The Atypical ‘Balloon Girl’ Auction
If you’re unfamiliar with the street artist Banksy, he is an anonymous England-based artist, activist, vandal, and film director. His street art tends to be quite satirical – employing dark humor to comment on political and social structures and events, and his stencil-graffiti works have been featured on walls, buildings, streets, and bridges of cities around the world. Some of his most famous works include ‘Rage, the Flower Thrower’, ‘One Nation Under CCTV’, and ‘Kissing Coopers’.
Although Banksy displays his art on publicly visible surfaces and doesn’t sell photographs or reproductions of his street art, art auctioneers have been known to attempt to auction off his works, either by removing his art or by leaving that task up to the winner of the auction.
This results in Banksy’s street art becoming exceptionally desirable. Sotheby’s, a famous British founded American multinational corporation, is one of the world’s largest brokers of fine and decorative art and in the first week of October of 2018, Sotheby’s auctioned off Banksy’s ‘Balloon Girl’ (UK’s 2017’s favorite art work). The auction was structured as an ascending-bid auction, or an English auction, where the auction is carried out interactively in real time, and the seller (Sotheby’s) gradually raises the price of ‘Balloon Girl’ as bidders drop out until one bidder remains. For the ‘Balloon Girl’ auction, Sotheby’s gradually raised the price until it hit a price of 1,042,000 pounds ($1.37 million), at which the last remaining bidder won it at that price.
However, as soon as the auction ended and the hammer was struck, the painting’s canvas quickly began scrolling downward past the frame. As the painting came out of the other end of the frame it was in vertical strips – the painting was being shredded live. Apparently, Banksy had secretly built a shredder into the frame in case the painting would ever go up for auction.
This brings up the question of value. As long as the winner of the auction didn’t bid unexpectedly, $1.34 million was either the buyer’s true value for the painting or below it. Now that the painting is shredded, the winner’s true value for the painting may be very different – either higher or lower, but they had already won it at the previous price. This would have a big impact on their profit.
Fortunately for the winner however, the shredding was seen as an integral part of the artwork – the media attention behind the stunt just propelled the work, and it is now seen as a piece of art history. In its shredded state, ‘Balloon Girl’ is now considered even more valuable than the original piece. If another auction was run on the shredded artwork, bidders may have vastly different true values than their original ones, and the outcome of the auction could have been very different. It is very interesting to see how the value of an object and true values of bidders can change so quickly (seconds after the auction’s conclusion).
There are videos of the shredding online if anyone is interested.