Banksy has always loved to use absurd characters to ironically describe various kinds of social oddities. After watching this documentary and I looked it up about Banksy, what struck me most was the clip about him destroying his own work. His work “Girl With Balloon” was auctioned at Sotheby’s London. The work, estimated at £200,000, sold for over five times that amount at £1.04 million. However, the moment the auction hammer was dropped, the painting slowly fell out of its frame and the lower half was destroyed into shredded paper strips, leaving everyone in the audience staring in disbelief. This unexpected act of art shocked the world and became an unforgettable moment in art history, as well as the first work to be created at auction. This kind of performance art is interesting, and in fact, the works Banksy has shown so far all carry the same idea he wants to express as the ones he did at the auction. Ironically, this dramatic act during the auction process led to an extremely rapid appreciation of the work. What was not expected was that his self-destruct mechanism failed and only half of the painting was torn to pieces, the other half remained intact in its frame. No doubt this will increase the price of his work by an unknown number of times, and this is the most interesting part, that his action, which was intended to be a satire of capitalism, has made his work the new darling of capital. I searched online and in 2021 this “half-destroyed” painting went up for auction again, selling for £18.6 million, well above the estimate and the 2018 auction price at the time. Isn’t that ironic.
I think he is an artist who has his own thoughts and the courage to express what he wants, which is something we should learn from.
