The Honor System (2012)

Magic happens in the minds of the audience and the method is the least interesting part. Shin Lin sells a video where he explains how to do his most famous act and some of the methods are so crude that I think many people would be surprised they hadn’t figured it out and some of them might feel cheated.

But it’s hands down the most beautiful card magic act I’ve ever seen. The real magic is in how he tells a story wordlessly, syncing it with music like a dance. You aren’t spending time trying to unravel how it happened because you’re so enchanted by the story.

Teller’s best tricks are the same way, and the fact that they often tell you more or less how the trick is done without ruining it confirms how unimportant the method is to the performance.

All of which is to say that I think teller was right to sue and I’m glad he won.

These days, finding out how to do 90% of the most popular magic tricks is a google search away, but it’s still very hard to perform magic well.

Teller won the lawsuit in 2014: https://www.courthousenews.com/teller-gets-545000-in-magic-f...

After reading the article and searching for Gerard Bakardy on Google, I found his version of the story: http://www.myfreedomofspeech.be/site2014/Welcome.html (note: the website is mostly made of images of text, so it may not display well on a small screen).

The linked article appears to posit that Gerard Bakardy might be an invention of Teller's? That's a pretty extraordinary claim. Has anything since borne it out?