An auction room. The auctioneer stands at the gavel, collectors fill the hall, and a painting is up for sale. Everything looks thoroughly respectable, until your eye reaches the writing on the painting itself: “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MORONS ACTUALLY BUY THIS SHIT.”

Behind the scene there is a specific historical moment. In 1987 Van Gogh’s Sunflowers sold at Christie’s for 22.5 million pounds, the highest price ever paid for a work of art up to that point. That sale is remembered as the start of the era of blockbuster lots in the market. Banksy’s auction room refers directly to that moment, and he replaces the painting being sold with his own sentence.

The real cleverness of the piece lies in the buyer’s position. Anyone who buys this print ends up hanging on their wall a work that calls them a moron. Its value has multiplied many times over the years, so the more expensive the insult becomes, the more it proves its own point. Banksy does not exempt himself from this loop. He is the subject of the joke as much as its seller.

The piece was unveiled in 2006 at the Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles. The first edition consisted of one hundred unsigned black and white screenprints, priced at five hundred dollars each and printed at the Modern Multiples workshop. In this Los Angeles edition one of the paintings has a gold frame around it, the detail that sets this edition apart from later ones.

In 2007 it was reprinted by Pictures on Walls, in three variants: 500 unsigned single colour prints, 150 signed single colour prints, and 300 signed sepia prints.

The piece’s later story fits its own subject perfectly. In 2021 a black and white Morons print, bought for 95,000 pounds, was burned live on stream by a group calling itself Burnt Banksy, turned into a digital token, and sold for roughly 400,000 pounds.