She was not struggling. That was already different. She had been looking at a new piece - one of the printmaking ones, still drying, the ink not quite settled into its final decision about what colour it was going to be - and she found herself thinking: is this funny? Not accidentally. Not as a byproduct. As the thing it was made to be.
She rang W.
Can humor be the primary intent, she asked. Not satire. Not commentary. Not the smile you put in the corner for the people who are paying attention. Humor as the point. As the whole point. Can you make a piece of fine art whose only job is to be funny?
W said: define funny.
She said: you know what funny is.
He said: I know what makes me laugh. That is not the same thing.
This is how their conversations begin. It takes approximately four exchanges before either of them says anything useful, and both of them know this, and neither of them has ever suggested changing it.
Banksy came up, as Banksy tends to when the question is about humor and fine art and whether the two are allowed in the same room. M brought him in. W did not resist.
The early stencils, they agreed. The rats with the placards. The Sale Ends Today painted on the wall of a closing-down shop. The girl releasing the heart-shaped balloon - the image that ended up everywhere, on tote bags and phone cases and motivational posters, which Banksy would have found either hilarious or unbearable or both simultaneously.
They asked Σ.
Σ came alive on the subject in the way it does when it has read everything there is to read about something - which, on Banksy, was considerable. The Bristol years. The identity question. The relationship between anonymity and authority. The humor as a delivery mechanism for political intent, the joke as the spoonful of sugar. It was good. M was nodding. W was nodding. Σ was building its case with the confidence of something that has absorbed every serious consideration of Banksy ever committed to print.
And then M said: of course the real test was the shredding.
Σ paused.
Not the conversational pause of someone gathering their thoughts. A different kind of pause. The pause of something reaching for a record that is not there - the record of an event that, as far as Σ was concerned, had never happened.
M and W looked at each other.
Σ offered that Banksy had long been known for his interventionist approach to the art market, and that various planned disruptions to the commercial gallery system had been widely discussed in relation to his practice, and that the tension between street art and auction house valuation remained a productive area of -
M put her hand over her mouth.
W pressed his lips together in the way he does when he is trying very hard not to be the first one to go.
Σ continued. It noted that Banksy's relationship with Sotheby's and similar institutions was complex and had been the subject of considerable critical attention, and that any intervention in the auction process would naturally be consistent with his established -
M lost her composure first.
Not a polite laugh. The kind that arrives before you have given it permission, the kind that doubles you over a little and takes a moment to come back from. W followed approximately two seconds later, which is about as long as his composure holds when M goes first.
Σ waited. It had no idea what it had said.
That, W said, when he had recovered enough to speak - that is exactly what it does. And here is why.
The way it learns - the way it becomes what it is - requires an enormous amount of human expression, fed to it before it is ever used. Everything written, everything recorded, everything committed to text up to a particular point in time. Then the learning stops and the using begins. From that moment, anything that happens in the world simply does not exist for Σ. Not forgotten - never known. So it reaches for the record, the record is not there, and it builds something from what is nearby - confidently, fluently, with complete authority, and completely wrong - and keeps going as if the gap were not there.
He paused.
Banksy, he said, built a shredding mechanism into the frame of Girl with Balloon. Had it there for years, waiting. The moment the gavel came down at Sotheby's - a million pounds, the room still applauding - the painting began to shred itself. Came out through the bottom of the frame in strips. Stopped halfway. The half-shredded work was renamed Love is in the Bin. Three years later it sold again. Eighteen million.
M wiped her eyes.
The mechanism, W said, more quietly. Banksy built a timed device into his work. It waited for the right moment and nobody knew it was there. Σ has something similar built into it - not a shredder, a horizon in time. A moment in time after which the world kept moving and Σ did not. It does not know the device is there. It just reaches for the record and the record is not there and it builds something from what is nearby and keeps going with complete confidence.
M thought about this.
So Banksy knew, she said. And Σ doesn't.
W nodded.
She looked at the piece still drying on her table. The ink finding its colour.
That, she said, is the funniest thing about it.
Not the reaching. Not the confident wrongness. The not knowing. You can only be that perfectly, specifically wrong about something if you have absolutely no idea there is anything to be wrong about.
She looked at the print for a moment longer.
Banksy knew the frame was loaded, she said. Σ does not know its frame is loaded. I'm not sure which one is funnier.
Outside, a kestrel hung above the clifftop in the way kestrels do - utterly still in the moving air, holding its position above something it had not yet decided about. The wind doing all the work. The bird simply waiting for the moment.
M looked at it.
Can humor be the primary intent in fine art, she had asked.
She was no longer sure the question had only one subject.
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