The original, unshredded painting (with shredder inside) no longer exists. So it was arguably destroyed. It no longer exists.
But, like I said, these are professionals. They have their butts covered. And there’s no way this happened without the seller’s involvement, just due the practicalities. My guess is that Banksy told them about this when he sold it to them, and they got the painting by agreeing to help him do this if they do it. And then, knowing the painting was going to be altered, they made sure to set it up where the money had to change hands before the sale was final.
Of course it exists. No part of it was destroyed. It’s true the work of art no longer has the “is unshredded” predicate. You’re arguing that “is unshreddeed” is an inherent part of the work, I’m arguing it was a temporary state* by design of the artist*.
But changing state is no different than any other painting changing over time - most Old Masters no longer have the “is uncracked” predicate, for instance - are they no longer in existence?
If someone shredded the Mona Lisa, we would say that it was destroyed. And heck, what is “destroyed”, anyway? Even if we burn a painting and dissolve the ashes in acid, heck, all the atoms still exist.
Of course, by the same token, no art can ever be created, either, since the paint and so on already existed before the artist applied it to the canvas.
If, instead, we say that art is not merely matter, but a particular arrangement of matter, then arranging it in that way is creating art, and radically changing that arrangement is destroying it.
And they’d be right. And it would be irrelevant, because this case is very different from the Mona Lisa. People keep indicating by their analogies that they believe the artwork was just the painting, which then had something done to it. This is a mistake, IMO.
Like I said - people thought the art was a particular arrangement (a static painting, nothing more), but it turned out it was another arrangement (an entire performance, involving painting, shredder-frame, remote and a delay period) and had always been that. *At no point *had the artwork actually been what people thought it was. It *always was *what it was.
The only thing being destroyed was the illusion that it was the other thing.
And that’s a legitimate argument. One can very easily say that one expects weird stunts from Banksy, and that it thus shouldn’t have been surprising that there was a weird stunt here, too, and that all that remained to be surprised about was just what the stunt was. And in fact, that seems to be approximately the view that the work’s new owner is actually taking. But the argument that “it wasn’t destroyed because all the pieces still exist” isn’t valid, because reducing something to pieces can (and usually does) destroy it.
If that was the sum of my argument, you’d be absolutely right, but my argument includes “…and is still the work of art the artist intended” after that.