A recrimination that is worth its weight in gold.
To denounce the abuses of a consumerist society, street artist Banksy hijacked
Monet's
Water Lilies
.
The work is on sale today, October 21 at Sotheby's, as part of the Modernités-Contemporary auction.
The auction, orchestrated in two stages, will be broadcast live on Museum TV this evening at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Read also: Sotheby's will broadcast its auctions live on television
Estimated between three and five million pounds, the painting entitled
Show me the Monet,
was produced in 2005. It exhibits supermarket trolleys as well as a traffic block blithely thrown into the landscape of the
Water Lilies.
The impressionist canvas celebrating the harmony of nature and the beauty of lights is thus transformed into a wild waste collection center, worthy of the wasteland adjacent to supermarkets.
The real damage to our environment is not caused by graffiti artists and drunken teens, but by big business… Exactly the people who put gold framed landscape photos on their walls and try to tell us how to behave.
Banksy
“
The real damage to our environment is not caused by graffiti artists and drunken teens, but by big business… Exactly the people who put gold framed landscape photos on their walls and try to tell us how to behave.
», Declared the artist on Channel 4 news, in 2005.
The work was exhibited at the London gallery Lazinc two years ago.
Steve Lazarides, one of the gallery's co-founders, revealed that “
we sold this painting for around 15,000 books.
Its owner now wants to sell it for almost five million.
"
The painting is part of a series revisiting famous works to denounce the abuses of consumerist society or to evoke environmental catastrophes, like
Sunflowers from Petrol Station
, inspired
by
Van Gogh's
Sunflowers
, which he represents withered.
The sale is broadcast live on the art channel Museum TV, from Paris and London, from 6 p.m.
