Recession-proof Banksy original — Free!

Sure it weighs about 2000 pounds and it’s gonna cost about 10 grand (US$) just to ship it out of here…but if you’re someone who actually collects this sort of thing, you really can’t complain about the price –it’s free (sorta).

Think about it as if it were a of giant concrete toy in a $100,000US box of cereal; which in this case happens to be the photographs of the thing being dug up and hauled from a location that its occupied for the last four years here in Kingston, Jamaica.

Now, apparently Banksy doesn’t approve of this sort of thing which is understandable when you consider how much people have paid for his street-jacked stuff in the past (and by extension how much money he has lost as a result).

Consequently, he’s set up a verification service which I have not used in this case for a couple of reasons (other than the obvious of course):

1) The wall is not actually for sale (its a bonus prize for buying the photographs).

2) I saw him do it a few years ago so I don’t need to verify anything with anybody. I know what he looks like and if he drops dead tomorow (God forbid) so will a lot of other people.

That said, you can’t really blame him for setting up a service to verify graffiti. Let’s face it, if your stenciled pictures of rats (ironically doing human stuff) sold at Sotheby’s for half a million dollars, would you really care if someone called you a sellout or would you just splash them with your new X6?

Art? Well, maybe not to me, but definitely the sort of thing that people will pay a LOT of money for; especially this Balloon girl thing that adorns the front of this particular concrete slab (albeit with the ‘iconic’ heart-shaped balloon replaced by a couple of planes (which someone told me had something to do with 9/11…or consumerism or anti-corporate stuff).

Anyway, check out the video which, if anything, should prove once and for all that power tools, alcohol and heavy objects that can fall and kill you (especially when they’re dangling from a piece of canvas belt), are not the best factors when it comes to snatching ’street art’ off the road.

Oh, and would someone please tell Angelina about the EBAY AUCTION. We need a couple X6’s down here.