Sixty Dollar Banksy
In 2013, Banksy set up a table in Central Park and sold original pieces for sixty dollars each. They were worth maybe two hundred thousand. Most people walked past. Some stopped. A few bought them, not knowing what they had.
It’s easy to laugh at the people who missed it. Those are the people you could hate-follow on social media, the ones who never got the good stock tips or showed up to the restaurant after it closed. But that stunt was meaner than that. Banksy wasn’t making fun of the tourists. He was saying something about value itself—about how much of what makes something precious is just recognition, attention, being in the right place with eyes open. The art didn’t change when people didn’t recognize it. The artist didn’t change. What changed was whether someone had decided it mattered.
I think that bothers people more than they admit. The idea that you could have had something and didn’t know. Not because you were poor or didn’t have access, but because you weren’t paying attention, because you were thinking about lunch, because someone needed to tell you first that a thing was worth wanting.
The table got cleared. The moment passed. There’s something almost cruel about that too—you can’t go back and fix it. The people who walked past stay the people who walked past.