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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."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday October 07 2018, @07:18PM (3 children)
I'm guessing short range transmitter, or there is another lie in the mix and the shredder was installed on site.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 07 2018, @08:05PM (2 children)
My question is who changed the battery. This *smells* like a stunt.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday October 07 2018, @08:24PM (1 child)
Indeed, or Banksy and friends have some secret super supply of batteries that lasts for years and years -- or wasn't it strange that they somehow demanded that the "frame" was connected to an outlet. Perhaps they had a little lamp installed in the frame that demanded power and the shredder was just a "surprise". Also shouldn't the shredder in the frame have been fairly visible from below? There has to have been a gap or holes of some kind. They clearly couldn't have been paying to much attention to it during their appraising or inspection.
From various image sources it seems the thing came out in long stripes so it wasn't really much of a shredder either. The thing might really just be worth more now, after the stunt, then it was before. It's not like the painting appears to have exited the frame in tiny confetti form. Even if it had been it would just have been a giant Banksy style jigsaw puzzle.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kazzie on Monday October 08 2018, @04:38AM
In pictures that I've seen of the partially shredded image, the shredded part outside the frame looks noticably darker than that still inside. A backlight would be a plausibe reason for the owner and auctioneer to leave it plugged in, and a charged laptop battery would be ample to run a radio transciever and a shredder.