Banksy's balloon-girl stunt is an economic masterpiece
The world-famous street artist's true talent is less in his stenciling than in revealing the ways in which the world interacts with art and artists
Based on experiments conducted by himself and others around his work, Banksy, the famous street artist, could write an economics dissertation on the monetary value of art. In a way, that unwritten paper could be his crowning achievement. The self-shredding stencil of a girl letting go of a heart-shaped red balloon, which made headlines over the weekend, was only Banksy’s latest contribution to the empirical study of the value of art. With his latest stunt — the shredder embedded in the frame was turned on remotely after the hammer fell on a $1.4m sale — the spray-painting star tested the nature of demand at the high end of the market. The result likely will be that the artwork’s clever partial destruction (the lower part of the picture now hangs prettily out of the frame, evenly cut into narrow strips) will only increase its value, since the happening was so public, and the stunned reactions of people in the auction room have been captured on video. Now, we have the auction price be...
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