Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Sunday October 07 2018, @06:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the go-£-sand dept.

Banksy Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby's

The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby's in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction.

The work, "Girl With Balloon," a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby's "Frieze Week" evening contemporary art sale. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby's.

"Then we heard an alarm go off," Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. "Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame." The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby's staff members, had been shredded, or at least partially shredded, by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame.

[...] Perhaps the shredded "Girl With Balloon" might eventually also prove a lucrative investment. Banksy pronounced the painting "going, going, gone" on his Instagram account, quoting Picasso: "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge." (The quote is often attributed to Picasso, but also to Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who died five years before Picasso was born.) But the painting was neatly shredded and could easily be backed on another canvas by a competent conservator. Thanks to the publicity of this stunt, could the painting now be even more desirable as a piece of auction history?

According to the artist, a shredder was secretly installed into the frame a few years ago in case the painting was ever put up for auction.

"Banksy is an anonymous England-based street artist, vandal, political activist, and film director."

Also at NPR and Engadget.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @07:06PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @07:06PM (#745588)

    With the shredder there is 99 percent chance of no harm to others. That number drops precipitously for combustion.

    Furthermore the shredder was likely far less volatile and far more reliable than combustible materials would have been.

  • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday October 08 2018, @03:58PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Monday October 08 2018, @03:58PM (#745997) Journal

    Yeah, that's what I thought: if it had burned, Sotheby's would have sued the bejeezus out of Banksy for spreading specks of soot over their immensely valuable auction place, and endangering other valuable works of art to burn up.

    It was a good show, though? Even more impressive than Marcel Duchamp's "fountain" from 1917 [wikipedia.org]