Banksy’s Identity Is Up For Auction On eBay: The Million Dollar Art of the Reveal
How much would you pay to reveal a secret? If the secret you’d like to know is the name of anonymous (for now) British street artist Banksy, you’ll have to pony up $999,999.00 +$1. {Mashable} We like seeing all of the 9s involved there.
The $999,999 figure is the current price attached to an eBay auction where someone claims that after matching up the prices of sold artwork to tax records, they know the artist’s name. For a price, they’ll mail a piece of paper to you with that name on it.
The mask could soon come off
On Banksy’s website though, there’s a claim that “Banksy neither produces or profits from the sale of greeting cards, mugs or photo canvases of his work. He is not represented by any of the commercial galleries that sell his paintings second hand and cannot be found on facebook/twitter/myspace etc.”
Which means that there’s no assurance that the name found is that of the artist, and even if it is your Facebook friend request will have nowhere to go.
On another note, how upset must the artist be that they didn’t consider this for a retirement plan? Or, perhaps they did. While Banksy is careful to disavow association with Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, there’s no mention of eBay and this is a pretty ingenious way to test the market for the value of a piece of “art” most of us give away in some form on a regular basis.
Around the world, hundreds of graffiti artists just went “why didn’t I think of that?”
