The most batshit art moments of 2023

This year began with a bang. Or perhaps I should say it started “smashingly,” because back in February, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog (Blue) didn’t pop, it shattered. As a Koons hater who feels waves of nausea lapping at my innards every time I look at the over-inflated prices of his gaudy baubles, I was thrilled. An art collector knocked Koon’s dog off its pedestal! Witnesses said she tapped it to see if it was a real balloon! Gallery staff swept the shards up into a dustpan, which was also bright blue! Really the whole thing couldn’t have gone better if it was a premeditated stunt, which some onlookers confessed to believing it was. “It was an event!” art advisor and witness Bénédicte Caluch told the Miami Herald. “It was like when Banksy’s artwork was shredded.”

As with Banksy’s shreds, which eventually fetched over $25 million at auction, the smashed-up pup was a potent symbol of the art world’s predilections. “When this thing fell to the ground, it was like how a car accident draws a huge crowd on the highway,” reported Stephen Gamson – art collector, artist, and the first person to try to buy Koons’ blue ceramic remnants.​​ “I find value in it even when it’s broken,” he said, like a blandly ‘inspirational’ therapy meme. “I was thinking I might put them in some sort of a plexi box with a plaque on them.” Unfortunately for Gamson, he wasn’t the only one to see value in the shards. Indeed, in a video he posted on Instagram, a woman can be heard saying, “You see, that is the new art installation! Everything’s art, isn’t it?” The gallery’s district manager Cedric Boero had a less philosophical reaction, pointing out the accident had whittled down the original 799 Balloon Dog editions to 798. “That’s a good thing for the collectors,” he quipped.

 

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All in all it was an auspicious start to 2023, promising an explosive year of bust ups and rubbernecking. And indeed, it seems clear we will look back on this year as one of exceptional destruction, riddled with incidents, accidents and major art world players being pushed off their pedestals (or at least teetering close to the brink). Five months after the Koons incident, for instance, an arson attack rendered Pistoletto’s Venus of the Rags ‘Venus up in flames’. The vast pile of clothes were turned to ash and the statue of the goddess herself melted, leaving the sculpture’s metal skeleton stripped bare. Given Pistoletto’s artwork was meant to represent the clash between beauty and the disaster of consumerism, its destruction by fire offered another potent symbol and easy metaphor. As the 90-year-old artist put it to an Italian newspaper, “the world is going up in flames anyway.”

At first, it seemed the art world’s upstart newcomers would be reduced to cinders fastest. The NFT market continued to crash and burn, culminating in an exceptional event where many visitors to ApeFest, a celebration of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, woke up blind. Apparently, the event organisers hadn’t realised they were using UV lights, which scorched attendees’ skin and eyes. But the biggest beast to fall was “immersive art” when Lighthouse Immersive filed for bankruptcy in the summer. Despite having swept the globe with ‘Immersive Frida Kahlo,’ ‘Immersive Monet & The Impressionists’” ‘Immersive Klimt: Revolution,’ ‘Immersive King Tut’, and, of course, ‘Immersive Van Gogh’ – to which an adult ticket cost between £18 and £30 – the company somehow managed to land its owners with a $16.6 million debt to a California partner. “The form of art lost its novelty and patrons had other options,” the bankruptcy filing claimed, which is a diplomatic way of saying “this was a pandemic-fever-induced, cash-grab trend that blew up and burst as quickly as a real balloon animal.”

 

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Yet, it became clear the oldies weren’t immune from 2023’s great reckoning either. Around the same time that Lighthouse packed up the majority of its projector shows, it was revealed the British Museum had a long-standing theft problem. Naturally, the jokes wrote themselves. Before his resignation, the museum’s former director Hartwig Fischer said: “This is a highly unusual incident. We take the safeguarding of all the items in our care extremely seriously.” Though, this certainly wasn’t the first time artefacts went missing from the museum. Personally, my favourite incident occurred in 1993, when Roman coins and jewellery worth £250,000 were taken after thieves broke in via the roof, like Tom Cruise on a tricky mission. Still, there is a silver lining for the museum – the embarrassing inside job altered the Google results for “British Museum stolen items” (what did I say about the jokes writing themselves?)

Some institutions had more luck this year though. The Louvre acquired a 13th-century painting by the Florentine artist Cimabue, which was narrowly saved from a trip to the rubbish tip, and later sold for £21 million at auction. To sound like Stephen Gamson, one person’s trash, right?  However this wasn’t the most dramatic recovery this year. On a Monday night in September, art detective Arthur Brand answered his door to a visitor clutching a battered IKEA bag. Inside was a Van Gogh painting worth £2.6m-£5.2m, which was stolen from a Dutch museum in 2020.

While this may have concluded a years-long chase by the “Indiana Jones of the art world,” as Brand is known, another Van Gogh-related treasure hunt yielded more chaotic results. In October, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum made the “difficult decision” to stop handing out limited-edition cards depicting Pikachu in the style of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait With Grey Felt Hat, after the collaborative exhibition with Pokemon was overwhelmed by visitors. “The phones haven’t stopped ringing in three hours,” one of the security staff told The Guardian on the show’s first morning. “It’s even busier than the Vermeer,” another added.

Still, with some limited edition cards fetching up to £7000 online, Pikachu fans probably had a more positive and lucrative year than Pierce Brosnan fans, who were nearly tricked out of a wad by a fake exhibition meet and greet. The SMS Art Gallery in Nottingham claimed they’d secured an “exclusive exhibition” of Brosnan’s paintings, with the James Bond star personally greeting fans on December 8th and 9th… if visitors coughed up 500 quid each for the pleasure. Yet, all the gallery really secured was a cease and desist letter from Brosnan’s lawyers. “The gallery does not have an agreement with Pierce nor has the gallery ever been in communication with Pierce or his reps about an exhibition,” a representative for the actor told the Evening Standard. All-in-all a deliciously strange one, which must have left Brosnan shaken (but not stirred?)

And so, we come to the end of a year defined by heists, fires and celebrity collaborations – but it’s nice to end on a high, so it’s probably best not to dwell on Hannah Gadsby’s ‘Pablo-matic’. Instead, let’s close with an honourable mention of the Pedro Pascal exhibition in Margate, which was visited by the man, the great Internet-daddy himself. Or at least, it would have been, if the gallery hadn’t been closed when Pascal pitched up. Perhaps he’ll return next year, when presumably the art world will put itself back together again, kintsugi style. Venus will once again be buried in rags at least, as nonagenarian Pistoletto gets back to work repairing his sculpture, “to show,” as art critic Vincenzo Trione put it, “that it is possible to rise from the ashes, not only metaphorically”. And if the trail of destruction continues, it probably doesn’t matter that much anyway. After all, there’s value in broken shards, and “everything’s art, isn’t it?”

 

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