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

[sl8]

(Not sure of the provenance of the Youtube video)



From https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/arts/design/uk-banksy-painting-sothebys.html

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

By Scott Reyburn
Oct. 6, 2018

LONDON — 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.

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More at link.

[mokawanis]

1. Love it!

so who takes the loss? the buyer?

[JI7]

3. it's probably worth more now

[GReedDiamond]

4. One of the articles about this which I read earlier said...

...that there was speculation that this might move the value of the piece to 2 million.

Also, it could be restored by basically gluing the cut strips to a backboard, and that its value could be greater for having been involved in such a high-end "artworld" prank.

[dalton99a]

6. I think it'll go up to 4 million if completely shredded

[Adrahil]

8. Actually....

If you made SURE the shredder was inactive, and mounted it with the painting half-shredded, you have a pretty damned interesting piece on your hands.

[GReedDiamond]

9. Yes, you do, but the fragility of that would be problematic...

...because the shredded strips could be easily degraded by exposure to air/uv light, if not ruined by tearing/staining etc.

The kind of mounting with glue that I referred to would be, of course, completely archival/museum standards of acid-free backboard and etc, and would be reversible, iow, you could restore it to its "original" shredded state with no harm to it.

[sl8]

2. Updated OP with embedded video link. n/t

[progressoid]

5. Idiots with too much money.

[JHan]

7. Excellent. Could I love Banksy more?