Banksy and the tradition of destroying art

Editor’s Note: Preminda Jacob is an associate professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. CNN is showcasing the work of The Conversation, a collaboration between journalists and academics to provide news analysis and commentary. The content is produced solely by The Conversation.

When the British street artist Banksy shredded his “Girl With Balloon” after it was purchased for US$1.4 million at Sotheby’s, did he know how the art world would react?

Did he anticipate that the critics would claim that the work, in its partially shredded state, would climb in value to at least $2 million? That the purchaser would not object and would instead rejoice?

We have no way of really knowing, though the famously anonymous artist did suggest that the shredder malfunctioned: The painting was supposed to be fully shredded, not partially destroyed.

As an art historian, I view his act in a larger context – as the latest example of artists deploying guerrilla tactics to expose their disdain for the critics, dealers, gallery owners and museum curators whom they depend on for their livelihood.

Sotheby's unveils Banksy's newly-titled "Love is in the Bin" at Sotheby's, which passed through a hidden shredder seconds after the hammer fell.

In shredding “Girl With Balloon,” Banksy seems to be pointing to a central absurdity of his graffiti art being treated as fine art. When it appears on city streets, anyone can vandalize it; now that the same images are in galleries and auction houses, they must be handled with white gloves.

But, as he may well know, the art market is far too wealthy and adaptable to be undone by a shredder.

In fact, we’ve seen the same pattern play out, time and again: An artist will launch a withering critique and instead of taking offense, the market simply tightens its embrace.

The many versions of subversion

Some of the most well-known of Banksy’s subversive artistic predecessors were part of the early-20th century Dada movement. One of their principal strategies involved denying the market of objects that could be commodified.

French-American artist Marcel Duchamp is perhaps the most well-known Dadaist. In 1917, his “Fountain,” a urinal laid on its back and remounted on a pedestal, was his first volley against the art market’s intellectual pretenses about art.

A 1964 replica of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" (1917)

Duchamp wanted to force the art world to acknowledge that its judgments about quality were based on media hype and money rather than artistic innovation.

However, years later Duchamp admitted to the futility of his gesture.

“I threw … the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” he lamented, “and now they admire [it] for [its] aesthetic beauty.”

In 1920, Francis Picabia, a Cuban-French Dadaist would follow Duchamp’s lead and participate in a performance purposefully designed to provoke the French art world.

Before a Parisian audience gathered at the Palais des Fêtes, Picabia unveiled a chalk drawing entitled “Riz au Nez” (“Rice on the Nose”). The artist’s friend, André Breton, one of the hosts of the event, then erased the drawing. The artwork lasted for just a of couple hours and is now lost to history. The work’s title, it’s been noted, sounds too similar to “rire au nez” (“to laugh in one’s face”) to be coincidental.

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In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg, who was then an up-and-coming American artist, plucked up the courage to ask Willem de Kooning, an established abstract expressionist, for one of his drawings. Rauschenberg didn’t tell de Kooning much – just that he intended to use it for an unusual project. Athough de Kooning was disapproving, he acquiesced.

After securing his gift, Rauschenberg proceeded, over the period of a month, to carefully erase all traces of the expressive pencil, charcoal and crayon drawing that de Kooning had put to paper.

Rauschenberg then re-titled the work, now preserved in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art, “Erased de Kooning Drawing.”

A look at some of the recent work of the famously anonymous British graffiti artist Banksy. Banksy's "Love is in the Bin" is unveiled on October 12, 2018, at Sotheby's in London. Originally titled "Girl with Balloon," the canvas passed through a hidden shredder seconds after the hammer fell on October 5 at Sotheby's London Contemporary Art Evening Sale, making it the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction.

Banksy protested the incarceration of Zehra Dogan, a Turkish artist who was imprisoned last year over a painting.

"Civilian Drone Strike," revealed in London last September, targeted one of the world's largest arms fairs.

The original version of Banksy's artwork features a red balloon. The print offered to voters in the Bristol area showed a balloon colored like a Union Jack flag.

In May, elusive street artist Banksy revealed a new mural. The large-scale painting depicts a worker chipping away at one of the twelve stars on the European Union flag.

In March, Banksy revealed a large-scale installation in Bethlehem. Titled the Walled Off Hotel, the interactive artwork features nine guest rooms and a presidential suite.

Each room critiques the division between Israel and Palestine, and the hotel looks out to a 30-foot concrete wall, which has been described as the largest canvas in the world.

In June 2016 elusive UK street artist Banksy painted this mural for students at a primary school in his hometown of Bristol, England. Students had named a house at their school for the artist, who surprised them with the mural when they returned from a holiday break. Here's a look at some other notable Banksy works.

A mural of a weeping woman, painted by the British street artist Banksy, is seen in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on Wednesday, April 1. The mural was painted on a door of a house destroyed last summer during the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The owner of the house said he was tricked into selling the door for the equivalent of $175, not realizing the painting was by the famously anonymous artist.

A Palestinian child stands next to a Banksy mural of a kitten on the remains of a destroyed house in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, in February 2015.

A child in Beit Hanoun walks past a mural February 2015 that depicts children using an Israeli watchtower as a swing ride.

A Banksy mural depicting pigeons holding anti-immigration signs was destroyed by the local council in Clacton-on-Sea, England, in October 2014 after the council received complaints that the artwork was offensive.

A Banksy work appears at a youth center in Bristol, England, in April 2014. Called "Mobile Lovers," it features a couple embracing while checking their cell phones. Members of the youth center took down the piece from a wall on a Bristol street and replaced it with a note saying the work was being held at the club "to prevent vandalism or damage being done." The discovery came shortly after another image believed to be by Banksy surfaced in Cheltenham, England.

"The Banality of the Banality of Evil" actually started out as a thrift store painting in New York City. Once altered by Banksy, who inserted an image of a Nazi officer sitting on a bench, it was re-donated to the store in October 2013, according to the artist's site.

Banksy's art exhibit "Grim Reaper Bumper Car" sits on New York's Lower East Side in October 2013. The famously anonymous artist, whose paintings regularly go for six figures at auction houses around the world, said he was on a "residency on the streets of New York."

A Banksy piece covers the main entrance to Larry Flynt's Hustler Club in New York's Hell's Kitchen in October 2013.

Banksy's replica of the Great Sphinx of Giza was made in Queens out of smashed cinder blocks.

Banksy's "Ghetto 4 Life" appeared in the Bronx in October 2013. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested that Banksy was breaking the law with his guerrilla art exhibits, but the New York Police Department denied it was actively searching for him.

Banksy art is seen on the Upper West Side of New York in October 2013.

Banksy work in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, was vandalized in broad daylight in October 2013.

One of Banksy's pieces is this fiberglass sculpture of Ronald McDonald having his shoes shined in front of a Bronx McDonald's.

Graffiti depicting the Twin Towers popped up in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York in October 2013.

Banksy's "Sirens of the Lambs" art installation tours the streets of Manhattan in October 2013. It was a fake slaughterhouse delivery truck full of stuffed animals.

A Banksy mural is seen on a wall in Queens. The quote is from the movie "Gladiator." It says, "What we do in life echoes in eternity."

A woman poses with Banksy's painting of a heart-shaped balloon covered in bandages. The piece, in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, was defaced with red spray paint shortly after it was completed.

A Banksy mural of a dog urinating on a fire hydrant draws attention

This installation, seen in October 2013, on the Lower East Side of New York, depicts stampeding horses in night-vision goggles. Thought to be a commentary on the Iraq War, it also included an audio soundtrack.

Gallery assistants adjust Banksy's "Love Is in the Air" ahead of an auction in London in June 2013. The piece was sold for $248,776.

"The Crayola Shooter" is found in Los Angeles in 2011. It shows a child wielding a machine gun and using crayons for bullets.

Banksy murals popped up around New Orleans a day before the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in 2008.

A silhouette of a child holding a refrigerator-shaped kite is seen on a wall in New Orleans in 2008.

Graffiti on the side of a building in New Orleans shows an elderly person in a rocking chair under the banner, "No Loitering," in 2008.

A scene titled "Chicken Nuggets," from Banksy's "The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill," is seen in New York in 2008.

A man walks past a Banksy piece in London in 2006.

A stenciled image of two policemen kissing is seen in London in 2005.

Banksy, the elusive street artist

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Jean Tinguely’s auto-destructing work, “Homage to New York” (1960), is probably the closest parallel to Banksy’s stunt. Made of scrap found in New Jersey junkyards, the massive work – 27 feet high and 23 feet in length – was supposed to be a mechanical display, sort of like a Rube Goldberg device.

The piece was set up the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and those attending the show included collectors Walter Arensberg and John D. Rockefeller III, and artists John Cage, Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg.

Tinguely briefly set the piece in motion – and then it burst into flames.

The Museum of Modern Art described the scene: “… a meteorological trial balloon inflated and burst, colored smoke was discharged, paintings were made and destroyed, and bottles crashed to the ground. A player piano, metal drums, a radio broadcast, a recording of the artist explaining his work, and a competing shrill voice correcting him provided the cacophonic sound track to the machine’s self-destruction – until it was stopped short by the fire department.”

Apart from a fragment from Tinguely’s “Homage” preserved in the MoMA collection, all that remains of the work is some choppy film footage.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone surpassing Tinguely’s sound-and-light spectacle. But in 2001, Michael Landy of the Young British Artists group orchestrated the most comprehensive “art as destruction” work to date.

Titled “Break Down,” Landy placed objects on a conveyor belt running into a machine that pulverized them. In the process, he destroyed all of his belongings – 7,227 pieces in all – including his own paintings and the art of his Young British Artist peers.

Guerrillas in the midst

These acts of destruction are motivated by the same impulse.

In the late 19th century, art production largely became untethered from patronage offered by the church or the state, and artists turned to powerful art dealers for their livelihood.

But many found that the radical, critical aspect of the artistic act was severely compromised – or erased altogether – when the most well-known feature of a work became the dollar sign attached to it.

To many, the market symbolized nothing more than a void.

With the urban street as his studio and insurgency as part of his artistic mission, Banksy’s graffiti often critiques institutions, such as the art museum, and authority figures like the police) and the Queen of England.

Though the market value of his work has soared in recent years, Banksy continues to paint images in public spaces that make preservation near impossible – and even invite theft or defacement.

Still, as guerrilla theater, Banksy’s recent act will be tough to beat. It’s certainly his most subversive and penetrating public foray into the elite art marketplace.

But even with all his critique, the question continues to nag: Is Banksy complicit with the art market? The very society he undermines, one that feeds on spectacle, has made him famous and his art immensely profitable.

Originally titled 'Girl with Balloon', the canvas passed through a hidden shredder seconds after the hammer fell at Sotheby's London Contemporary Art Evening Sale on October 5.

In the wake of World War I, Dadaist artists made a practice of shocking their public audiences by wantonly destroying their own artistic creations. The public soon learned to cheer them on, and to detach themselves from the attack artists were actively waging on their sensibilities.

A century later, at Sotheby’s, the initial shock of a shredded “Girl With Balloon” dissipated quickly. The hype only grew. The market adapted.

Sotheby’s has since released a statement declaring that the piece – renamed “Love is in the Bin” – is “the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction.”