Best-Known Piece Of Art Self-Destructs After Being Sold For £1m

When you see such a prank, by a street artist ridiculing the structure that pays him, and that the value of the painting still skyrockets after its destruction, then we shouldn't be asking ourselves why money is leading us to an impasse.

Additionally when looking at the "girl with the balloon painting", what is so special about it? Although appealing, EC cannot say if the latter could be called "great art". Whether we like the painting or not is not the core issue here but Banksy's rapport with the "art market":

Banksy made his position clear in 2006, lamenting the trend of money-hungry gallerists and collectors who steal works of street art from the public sphere in order to personally profit from them on the secondary art market. “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,” he said. “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.” MORE: https://medium.com/@jenniferrabin/banksy-didnt-shred-his-painting-the-art-market-did-5fbf8c2423b7

There are millions of starving artists in the world that will never make a living with their work because they have never bumped, and never will bump, into the right connections and are destined to a life of misery, if they do not have a side job to pay the bills. Many will become depressed as a result and die in a state of profound bitterness.

There was a second elephant in the room: the fact that shiny fancy people were about to spend millions of dollars on work that the artist had always offered for free to anyone who walked past it on the street. Banksy was showing us our greed, our capitalist desire to possess objects that are not possessable, our myopia. We don’t want to look beyond what we’re seeing. We want only the veneer. (medium.com)

It is all the greed in the world that is killing the "purpose of life". And this is not only about art but so many other fields. Greed poisons them all. Humanity is at crossroads.

Only a money-free society can make it justice by challenging our dire state of affairs.

Banksy Painting Likely Soars in Value After Self-Destructing Through Built-In Shredder
OCT 06, 2018 | The British artist Banksy managed to pull off what many are calling one of the most daring and audacious pranks in the art world as one of his paintings self-destructed moments after it was sold for $1.4 million at auction. The work, Girl With Balloon, obtained a winning bid of 860,000 pounds, which came out to 1.042 million pounds once the buyer’s premium is taken into account. That was more than three times the estimate and a record.... Banksy posted a video on Instagram Saturday showing how he built a shredder into the painting “in case it was ever put out for auction.” Although Banksy has previously expressed disdain for the art market, his actions may have actually increased the value of the work. It is normal for an auction house not to expect a buyer to go through with a purchase if the work was damaged somehow. But in this case, experts speculated the painting could now be even more valuable “given its status as the subject of one of the greatest pranks to have been played on the art market,” notes the Financial Times..... The website MyArtBroker.com, which resells Banksy pieces, agreed the piece had suddenly become much more valuable after the prank. “This is now part of art history in its shredded state and we’d estimate Banksy has added at a minimum 50% to its value, possibly as high as being worth £2m plus....
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/banksy-painting-likely-soars-in-value-after-self-destructing-through-built-in-shredder.html

Banksy has played what could be one of the most audacious stunts in art history, arranging for one of his best-known works to self-destruct after being sold at auction for just over £1m.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/06/banksy-sothebys-auction-prank-leaves-art-world-in-shreds-girl-with-balloon

Banksy graffiti: Cash machine - Web Art Academy