Listicle: 10 artists who lowkey trolled the public

Congo, the chimp who painted. Congo lived a short life (1954-1964) but he was painting by age four and completed some 400 abstract-impressionist works in his lifetime. His fans included Pablo Picasso and the Duke of Edinburgh. He had a curator too – artist-zoologist Desmond Morris. Like human artists, his works went up in value after his death. In 2019, 55 works went on auction, some commanding £6,000.

Banksy’s self-shredding painting. Minutes after the British graffiti artist’s Girl with a Balloon fetched £1 million at auction in 2018, shredders built into the frame began to rip the canvas. People looked on, horrified. It stopped halfway. Then, a world first: It became a new work, one created at an auction, and was renamed Love is in the Bin. It was resold for nearly £19 million in 2021.How’s that for a statement on the commercialisation of art?

Salvatore Garau’s invisible sculpture. The Italian conceptual artist sold his sculpture Io Sono (I Am) for €15,000 at Art-Rite auction in 2021. The buyer was given a certificate of authenticity and instructions to display the work in a 5×5 foot empty space. Except that no sculpture actually existed. Viewers were told to use their imagination. After all, “Don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?” Garau said. What a scam!

John Lennon’s porcelain commode. The musician’s ornate, floral, blue-white, porcelain toilet made it to auction and even sold for £9,500 at Liverpool’s annual Beatles convention in 2010. This toilet bowl was replaced at Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park property, his residence between 1969-72. After remaining with builder John Hancock for 40 years until his death, it was subsequently auctioned to an overseas collector.

Gerhard Richter’s bloody glass. The German artist didn’t do much more than apply a coat of red pigment on a mirror. The 1991 oil-on-glass work, titled Mirror, Blood Red went for $1.31 million, at auction in 2008. Critics say that the blood-red hue challenges viewers’ perception about what is seen and what is reflected. But many others called it out for being a bloody prank.

James Franco’s Fresh Air. In 2011, the actor backed a strange project called the Museum of Non-Visible Art – there were no actual works, just ideas. And they were on sale. Those who bought an imagined piece received a card with detailed dimensions and descriptions that they could hang on a wall and presumably show off to others. They had a buyer too. Aimee Davison paid $10,000 for a work titled Fresh Air.

Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days. Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, didn’t just collate 5,000 digital images into one giant work, he ended up becoming the first artist whose NFT sold for a record $69.3 million in 2021. The buyer, Vignesh Sundaresan, Singapore-based programmer and founder of Metapurse. It got the world talking about digital rights, but we eventually stopped. Beeple’s work is now worth less than $1,000.

Christopher Wool’s Word Paintings. FOOL fetched $14.1 million in 2014. RIOT sold for a staggering $29.9 million in 2015. Both works are from the American artist’s series of minimalist word paintings (1987-1992). Both feature not much more than the words stencilled in black capital letters against a white background. Provocative? Sure. The idea is to be so reductive that the idea breaks through viewers’ cynicism.

Jeff Koons’s steel rabbit. When a 41-inch stainless-steel, balloon-animal-shaped bunny gets auctioned for $91 million, it marks a moment when art exists to make headlines. The hype is part of the work. US pop artist Jeff Koons knows this well. His sculpture from his Rabbit series (1986) was auctioned in 2019 at a record-breaking price for a work by a living artist. That’s all it is, a big steel bunny. Make of that what you will.

From HT Brunch, October 25, 2025

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