Banksy in Baden-Baden: "They would also auction a bag of ash"

Is it perhaps the man with the well-oiled bun who keeps hanging on the phone? The Asian student in the black trench coat, who with the lethargically apathetic face? Maybe the guy who keeps the fluffy micro for the cameraman from SWR and grins so strangely? Or one of the two old ladies with the wine-red berets? Everyone in the room could be the ominous Banksy. One does not know.

Certainly this can only be said about the work of art in the darkened Cabinet of the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden: "Love is in the Bin" stands next to the wall, a real Banksy: "Spray paint, acrylic on canvas on wooden board, 142 x 78 x 18 cm, artist frame ". This conspicuously swanky "artist frame" had it all - and a shredder.

No sooner had the work titled "Girl with Balloon" been auctioned off on October 5, 2018 at the London auction house "Sotheby's" for 1.2 million euros to an unknown bidder, but it was set in motion (presumably by the artist himself initiated by remote control) mechanism that shredded the image in front of the world public.

The mysterious buyer

Well, not quite. So shredded or even "destroyed", as was rumored, the picture is not. The girl's legs hang in exactly 29 clean strips under the frame, in which the red, heart-shaped balloon still floats. Above: bare wood. Either the mechanism failed halfway. Or the artist had planned it that way. One does not know.

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As one does not know the anonymous buyer, who, after some initial horror, understood "that I came to my own piece of art history". The circumstance that she makes the work of all imaginable places accessible to the public for the first time temporarily in the bourgeois and contemplative Baden-Baden and then permanently in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, leads to the assumption that she is a German. Maria Furtwängler? Susanne Klatten? Trixie Dörfel? One does not know.

At any rate, there was great demand when the doors of the museum opened at ten o'clock on Tuesday morning. Up to 5,000 curious people per week are expected, for whom the rather small house has prepared itself with an airport-locked visitor guidance system. - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and other representatives of the expressionist "Brücke" will spend a wallflower existence in the next four weeks. The Banksy in the room next door's free.

The majority of the visitors on the first day come from the area, from Ettlingen or Heilbronn, but some also came specially for the event from the Netherlands or nearby France. Two students have had to give a presentation on Banksy and have since been intrigued, an elderly man believes to know that the process of destruction is "unique in art history."

Do not become too subversive

They are all interviewed by journalists as if they were art experts, and they all have an opinion. Everyone takes selfies in front of the object, which is protected from access by bulletproof glass. And not only that. "Banksy is critical, subversive, but he is also very intelligent, has a special sense of humor and is very clever," said museum director Henning Schaper in an interview. So that it does not become too subversive and humorous, because also the hidden mechanism was deactivated. So that something does not start unexpectedly and rattles more art history.

Flanked is the exhibition with the single "Good Song" by Blur, whose cover the girl with balloon graced for the first time - now there is the motif in 800 authorized variants. On one screen runs Banksy's Mockumentary "Exit Through The Gift Shop", on another of the artist's own documentation of the preparation of the action as shared on his Instagram account.

The work itself, originally the instrument of an art-critical performance, seems frozen and defused, as in actu . If the picture has something aura in it, then the ridiculously tilting melancholy of a prepared hunting trophy.

It was to be displayed in an underpass in London or, as in one of its political modifications, on the wall between Israelis and Palestinians. But in the museum? "If you visit an art gallery," Banksy once said, "you're just a tourist in the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires."

The real criticism of street art has been collected, priced in as an "interesting" artistic attitude, the impulse itself musealized and released to admire. "Goose bumps pure", as a visitor says. What is really visible in Baden-Baden like seldom, is the ghostly efficiency of a market that still makes the criticism of itself into money.

Museums are subordinate to the art circus

The big debates are being ignited today in the auction houses, the museums have long been subordinated to their brimstone. In Stuttgart, "Love is in the Bin" is to be permanently integrated into the collection. In an alleged allusion to the intangibility of its originator, the image is supposed to be hung here and sometimes there, leading the audience into the most remote corners of the house. As a curious decoy. Where is it? One does not know.

What remains of the hype surrounding this image is therefore a depressing lesson about reintroducing the resistant into the marketplace. The gesture of refusal becomes an affirmative gimmick, the artifact of refusal becomes a particularly valuable commodity.

Banksy specialist and art historian Ulrich Blanché points out, "You can not completely escape the market." He does not know for sure, but suspects: "Sotheby's would also auction a sack of ashes if Banksy had decided to destroy the plant by explosion or fire."