A collective named Burnt Banksy burned a work by the famous street artist live on Twitter in an attempt to sell it virtually in the form of "non-fungible tokens", digital assets. The painting, entitled Morons ("Fools"), was not chosen at random.
"I can't believe you Morons actually actually buy this shit." This is the sentence written on the work Morons ("Imbéciles"), signed Banksy showing an auction of artworks. This painting, worth 95,000 dollars (nearly 80,000 euros) was purchased by the company Injective Protocol, a transaction platform using blockchain technology - block data storage based on cryptography -, and entrusted to collective Burnt Banksy.
These cryptocurrency enthusiasts have reserved an unexpected fate for the web, deciding to "burn it in a live video on Twitter", relates CBS News The Burnt Banksy video
But their operation does not stop there, continues CBS News : the objective of the company is to "transform the work into a virtual object called a non-fungible token", to sell it in digital auctions: "While digital art has recently gained in popularity, details CBS, this event is the first major transformation of a physical work into a unique digital object, according to the head of Injective Protocol, Mirza Uddin."
The latter explains the objective of performance in these terms:
We see this autodafé as an artistic expression in itself. We chose a work by Banksy on purpose since he had already destroyed one of his creations at an auction."
In October 2018, the famous street artist from Bristol had indeed scheduled the self-destruction of his painting Girl with Balloon , without knowing the London auction house Sotheby's. It is not the first time either that a creation of Banksy has been bought for destruction: the American artist Ron English had spent 730,000 dollars (639,000 euros) to destroy the graffiti Slave Labor ("Slavery"), in order, he said, to denounce the commodification of art. © CourrierInternation.com
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