The piece consists of a half-shredded canvas in an ornate frame bearing a spray-painted image of a girl reaching for a heart-shaped red balloon. The sale price of $25,383,941 includes an auction-house fee known as a buyer’s premium. “Love is in the Bin” was offered by Sotheby’s in London, with a presale estimate of 4 million pounds to 6 million pounds ($5.5 million to $8.2 million).Īfter a 10-minute bidding war involving nine bidders in the saleroom, online and by phone, it sold for three times the high estimate to an undisclosed buyer. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.Ī work by British street artist Banksy that sensationally self-shredded just after it sold at auction three years ago fetched almost $25.4 million on Thursday - a record for the artist, and close to 20 times its pre-shredded price. It’s almost as if Banksy is trying to warn us that technology is eroding ownership, concentrating power and shifting agents of control.This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Whatever the exact workings of the mechanism underpinning the stunt, the act is of course the point. Unless, well, Banksy snuck into the friend’s house to swap out batteries periodically. So the built-in shredder, batteries and radio seemingly had to sit waiting for their one-time public use for 12 years. Although the artwork itself was apparently gifted to its previous owner by Banksy all the way back in 2006. There are certainly lots of low power, short range radio technologies that could have been used for such a trigger scenario. The suggestion, also from the video (which appears to show close up shots of some of the reactions of people in the room watching the shredding taking place in real time), is that the man - possibly Banksy himself - attended the auction in person and waited for the exact moment to manually trigger the self-destruct mechanism. The video also appears shows how the canvas was triggered to get to work cutting.Īfter the hammer goes down the video cuts to a close-up shot of a pair of man’s hands pressing a button on a box with a blinking red LED - presumably sending a wireless signal to shreddy to get to work… “In rehearsals it worked every time…” runs a caption towards the end of the video, before footage of a complete shredding is shown… It shows footage of an identical-looking. Or, at least, so the prankster says - via a ‘director’s cut’ video posted to his YouTube channel yesterday (and given the title: ‘Shred the love’, which is presumably what he wanted the resulting frame-sans-canvas to be called). However, a new video, posted on Banksy's website Wednesday, implies that the 2006 painting 'Girl with Balloon' was supposed to be entirely destroyed. And had in fact been intended to send the whole canvas into the bin the second after it sold. However it turns out that the shredder malfunctioned. Thereby undermining what might otherwise be interpreted as a grand Banksy gesture critiquing the acquisitive, money-loving bent of the art world.

The damaged canvas even instantly got a new title: Love Is in the Bin. Yet the stunt immediately inflated the value of the canvas - some suggested by as much as 50% - despite the work itself being half shredded, with just a heart-shaped balloon left in clear view. Immediately the Girl with Balloon canvas sold - for a cool ~$1.1M (£860,000) - it proceeded to self-destruct, via a shredder built into the frame, leaving a roomful of designer glasses paired with a lot of shock and awe, before facial muscles twisted afresh as new calculations kicked in.Īs we reported at the time, the anonymous artist had spent years planning this particular prank. by the artist at the auctioneer Sothebys in London, his portrait of Lenin. In the connected future will anyone truly own any thing? Banksy’s artworld shocker performance piece, earlier this month, when a canvas of his went under the hammer at Sothebys in London, suggests not. Banksys world-renowned shredded painting, Love is in the Bin, has fetched.

Banksy picture shred video