prank, or, more abstractly, a game. Under this perspective, perhaps we watched at the historical modernization of the notion of Duchamp’s readymade already enjoyed by Banksy, as well as the situationist thought that affects the artwork. 81. Duchamp’s readymade expresses a certain level of stability of the state of things in general, and of objects in particular, and in a way, is the result of historical materialism, which, however, does not adapt to the temporary nature of the state of things and objects that we are forced to accept due to the instability and progressive dematerialization of objects in our days. Hence, we could antithetically call it: historical immaterialism. 82. This is the answer to what staging represents: it performs a game shown in a sort of Banksy’s readymasking, rather than in the Duchamp’s readymade. 83. Is art a game? Yes, it is. 84. Unveiling the work through a short video (2018) where the artist shows the technique to get the canvas shredding, Banksy tells the story as if it were a fairy tale (ten years ago...) and quotes Bakunin. What does it mean? Why does Banksy talk to us about destruction? Finally, is it really destruction? 85. Art and destruction have long long discoursed—think of Fontana’s cuts, Burri’s combustions, John Reed’s work. Caws and Delville dealt with creative destruction in their essay Undoing Art published in 2017 remarking that the destruction of an artwork (undoing) would be a part of the artist’s construction process; in other words, when the artist destroys the artwork, he is actually building himself. 86. This analysis is confirmed, in fact, by the results of the artist’s action. By destroying the artwork, Banksy obtains two effects, the first is to widen the distribution of his work (the video), and the second is to increase the value of all his artworks. It seems that the artist significantly contributes to his own formation, as Caws and Delville argued. 87. The performing aspect of an act of destruction has a spectacular side, too, since it can attract attention in a much more pervasive way than an act of construction. Creative destruction affirms a secularised and desacralized art. When Bailey Bob Bailey proposes to destroy the Christmas
tree ritual (Caws and Delville, 2017), he is staging the paganisation of a sacred rite that was finally swallowed up by the consumer civilization. Banksy does the same. 88. Creative destruction is a paradigm mostly used by modern power that has understood its economic and political potential, just think of the wars to stabilize regions of the world and to the process of reconstruction and management.
boundaries. As much as it is expected of artists to follow the rules like anyone else, the license we grant creativity is ultimately about giving artists some tacit permission to constantly stretch, challenge, and, if need be, defy this unending accumulation of boundaries. Even if the artist is expected to follow the general rules like all the others, he
is tacitly granted the license to move, challenge—if necessary—violate these countless boundaries. Someone has to do it, and although it is to be expected that criminals, fools and children will do it, all in all we prefer an artist to do it. So, the best way to know a limit is to find someone who is pressing to break it” (McCormick, 2015).
89. The relationship between art and destruction has always given back an aesthetic of entropy, chaos, and unrepeatability. So far, the destruction of artwork has been an act generating entropy, mainly the reduction of materials into pieces, or their unidirectional transformation. A process able to create an aesthetic of wreckage, of decomposed rupture that perfectly suits the informal research of one’s own time. 90. Through this work, Banksy goes beyond the well-known paradigm of destruction. The object used to carry out Banksy’s destruction is a real symbol of the rational and industrialized principle of destruction: the office shredder machine, the object that the administrative world appointed to destruct its secrets when it is too late to hide them. Aesthetics experiences it in a revolutionary way. The visible result of this destruction is not shapeless chaos of materials, but an orderly, industrialized, tidy, rational and logical destruction that is totally dispossessed of the power of material transformation that stays intact in the perceptive capacity of the work, increasing its dissonance. 91. The presence of dissonance in our contemporary life is so repeated and habitual that there seems to be no valuable aesthetic experience that is not veiled by pain (Iannelli, 2010). 92. Therefore, such artwork is not the result of its destruction but its refit, its reconfiguration according to a precise aesthetic canon offered by an office technology. 93. “The form of modern art will be adequate to the truth content of time” (Hegel, 1997). 94. One question has remained unanswered: what is the truth that this artist is telling us? The truth is that “society, as the collective condition that strives for order in a vain effort to defy the entropy of being, is a construction of 34
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