The most consequential information artefacts, entities and systems are those which generate, as conceptual heredity, further artefacts, entities and systems – open and unbounded without closure. What we see in Banksy’s stunt is not the significance of an artefact or an event so much as it is the exponentiated significance of significance itself.
Koons played the art market much as one might shape a stock market – manipulating perception and expectation by producing and marketing relatively simplistic aesthetic idioms; Banksy manipulates significance and a hybrid art market and media fascination follows like so many swarming moths to a naked flame of cultural and economic salience, entropy and novelty. Value (as significance) is in this sense a pure manipulation and comprises a deception in which people are more than happy to play the game of investing time as attention and money as meaning, recursively reproducing the fascination and hype of significance (and value).
Banksy’s art sells itself and in this sense he has weaponised and applied the cultural machine against itself as a transmission medium for optimally efficient conceptual self-propagation – which is what all art in effect does, and at times – quite self-consciously
Daedelus Kite 