State of the Art: Banksy’s legendary prank reveals the paradox of spectacle

So rarely does the art world make international headlines, I would be remiss not to share my thoughts on Banksy’s now-infamous Oct. 5 stunt: publicly and purposefully shredding an iconic painting that sold for $1.4 million. The exact moment the Sotheby’s auctioneer’s gavel slammed, “Girl With Balloon” passed through a shredder hidden in its frame, rendering its lower half mangled and protruding from the bottom.

In a three-minute short film titled “Shred the Love,” Banksy revealed documentation of the meticulously calculated prank that resulted in the one of the most epic metaphorical middle fingers to commercialism that he has ever pulled off.

In the same video, Banksy refuted torrents of conspiracies surrounding whether the painting had really been shredded by including an epilogue in which his masked team members carry out a successful test run of the frame’s mechanism in the artist’s studio. Through this, he sent the world a shocking clarification: The frame mechanically malfunctioned and the entire work was supposed to have been destroyed.

“Some people think it didn’t really shred. It did,” one of Banksy’s Instagram captions reads. The video proclaimed: “In rehearsals it worked every time…”

These newfound revelations hardly detract from Banksy’s well-known penchant for publicity stunts or erase the fact that the million-dollar painting was irreparably shredded. Even the frame has become a relic of the age of oversaturated media and capitalism Banksy so openly condemns.

Splashed across front pages and homepages, the affront Banksy inspires in a post-truth society seems extraordinary. Videos from the auction room show Sotheby’s patrons, employees and onlookers wide-eyed, gaping-mouthed, leaping to their feet in awe, bearing paralyzed expressions.

But for those of us familiar with Banksy’s work, his latest brazen performance is hardly uncommon for contemporary art’s most notorious provocateur. It signals the artist’s comeback to the public consciousness and proves the futility of his consistent attempts to alienate himself from art and its markets.

In late 2000s London, an anonymous street artist by the moniker Banksy exploded onto the arts scene to critical acclaim — all at once, he was a populist icon for his signature stencil style and a sellout for dominating auctions emblematic of the very capitalist abuses his art censured.

Along with reviving graffiti and grassroots activism, Banksy’s success has triggered discourse about how the art world arbitrarily assigns intellectualism and value. To this day, despite having his iconography littered across gritty urban walls globally and being named one of the world’s most influential people, Banksy’s identity remains unknown (he supplied a photo of himself with a paper bag over his head to Time Magazine) and central to his widespread appeal.

When I saw Banksy’s works at the Modern Contemporary Museum in Amsterdam, I couldn’t help but think that they looked wrong exhibited in chaste, orderly gallery spaces instead of strewn across sidewalks, T-shirts and cheap prints. Banksy’s iconoclasm is not meant to be experienced within traditional confines, yet his subversion is exactly what makes him so valuable in commercial markets.

Whether consciously or self-consciously, Banksy has become a paradox, implicit in his own commerciality and made to fit a mold he has always rejected. In reality, with all the collectors invested in him, it’s pointless for Banksy to try to outrun his commercial shadow. Without the endless flow of money he allegedly despises, he would be nothing.

As Banksy surely knows, the art market cannot be undone by an elaborate shredder prank. On the contrary, I think he’s outgrown and outsmarted all us. Perhaps he long ago abandoned the rebellious pipe dream on which he built his brand and has been subtly exploiting the art world by masquerading as its mortal enemy, its most vehement critic.

At the very least, he certainly anticipated that the painting’s value would climb to a projected $4 million, and the unnamed buyer would wind up with, as they put it, their “own piece of art history.”

The structures of the art world are so inextricable from artists themselves that we’ve seen this archetype play out before; Marcel Duchamp put a literal urinal on display as a critique of museums’ high-mindedness and inadvertently pioneered the movement of the readymade art object.

And now, with Banksy, we again see an artist launch a potentially destabilizing examination only to be embraced and glorified by the very art market he vilifies.

Already, the market has evolved and adapted to accommodate Banksy’s revolution. Sotheby’s has since released a statement stating the tattered painting was renamed “Love Is in the Bin” and marks the first time an artwork was “created live at auction.” The Paris auction house slated to sell his prints next have even expressed hope that a similar stunt will transpire. Ultimately, the art world has continually proved its virtual immunity to denunciations, meaning people like Banksy have been either shouting into the void or long since absorbed into the machinery of the market. I don’t know which one is worse but win or lose, Banksy is out to create art history and he’s unstoppable.

Catherine Yang is a junior majoring in communication. She is also the associate managing editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “State of the Art,” runs every other Tuesday.