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Banksy Art Self-Destructs After Selling for $1.4M

By Rowena Salazar

Anonymous artist Banksy stunned the art world on October 6, 2018 with a prank that caused one of his paintings to self-destruct. Moments after "Girl With Balloon" sold for $1.4M via phone auction at Sotheby's auction house, an alarm sounded. Then, a remote-controlled mechanism slid the canvas down its frame where a shredder was hidden. Several videos and photos show the painting hanging halfway shredded outside of its frame.

"Girl With Balloon" was a spray paint on canvas work completed in 2006 and shows a small child reaching up toward a heart-shaped red balloon. The original work was stenciled on a wall in east London and is one of Bansky's most recognizable images.

Banksy, an England-based graffiti artist, is also considered a political activist and vandal. He has remained anonymous since gaining fame for his stenciled graffiti art, usually spray-painting his murals in the middle of the night. Banksy often incorporates dark humor, political messaging, and social commentary into his art. He openly criticizes commercialism, once even selling works of his art at a New York Central Park pop-up shop for $60 a piece, far below their value. In 2007, he graffitied "ONE NATION UNDER CCTV" on the side of a British postal service building.

"Graffiti art has a hard enough life as it is, before you add hedge-fund managers wanting to chop it out and hang it over the fireplace," the New York Times quoted Banksy in 2013. "For the sake of keeping all street art where it belongs, I'd encourage people not to buy anything by anybody, unless it was created for sale in the first place." (Ryzick, M. "Another Banksy Mural to Go from Wall to Auction." The New York Times, 12 August 2013).

Soon after shredding his own painting, which sold for a record-high price, Banksy posted a photo on his Instagram account of the half-shredded painting with a caption reading "Going, going, gone …" He also posted a video describing how "a few years ago I secretly built a shredder into a painting … in case it was ever put up for auction …" He captioned the video with a quote from Pablo Picasso—"The urge to destroy is also a creative urge."

From the Graffiti Review

"While some have expressed shock, and anger at the current half-shredded state of 'Girl With Balloon,' we offer a different take; her trip through the shredder was not an act of vandalism. Bansky's action possessed all the hallmarks of a choreographed performance. It was beautiful, it had a live audience, and it most certainly elicited a strong reaction."

In a paragraph of at least five sentences, answer the question: Was Bansky's action one of vandalism or art? Include at least one specific reference to each excerpt in your response.