The Banksy Episode: a POV

You are form as expression, never a message.

Form: what does it mean? I was wondering about, by observing/looking at, you can see a wall, just a wall or a space.

Means: first of all, the episode itself matters or perhaps as we would say nowadays, in order to keep up with the technological step: the algorithm, which does not correspond to the frame but, according to the eye of the one writing, corresponds to the audience in the room and, now, from now on, still according to me, it’s about “who watches.”

The frame? What does it change about that? It was a mural destined to perish, to be cleaned up… and neither, because that little girl is stencil + spray paint. And the bank? The money? …and the hammer? The noise?

…and what about Experience, or perhaps it would be more honest to specify: the experience of expectation (goal/aim). Let’s ask Godot’s “motionless waiting.”

Meanwhile: what is this article about today? Read the title back up and still let’s ask Godot or the author, Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906–1989): “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”

In 2006 Banksy created, using a stencil on a wall in London’s South Bank, girl with balloon. In 2017 the British public voted it the “nation’s favourite artwork.”

At some point, the work was put up for auction by Sotheby’s on October 5th, 2018, framed (estimate: £200–300k). When the hammer came down at £1,042,000, Love is in the Bin happened. The shredder had been programmed to stop halfway. The value skyrocketed. In 2021 the same artwork was auctioned again and sold for £18.5 million.

You would never be message because even Form (aesthetic, geometric…) depends on who you are or who you aspire to be or who you will never become despite everything… always because of what you aspire to.

This been said, you still only ask who the artist is and you cannot even recognize him, great experts! You deserve losses, but you earned memory; the same memory you do not even want to claim, despite the fact that it is what you have always desired; proved by the name AROUND the hammer.

Now, let’s talk about girl with balloon ’cause Love is in the Bin it’s done (not over) on a wall.

— written by Simonetta Waïss