(Bloomberg) -- In 2018, a painting by Banksy began to self-destruct while it was on the auction block at Sotheby’s in London.
Just after the spray-painted artwork of a girl holding a balloon sold for about £1 million ($1.4 million) an alarm went off and the work slowly began to fall through a shredder hidden inside the frame. After it was about halfway through, the shredder stopped—or jammed.
Sotheby’s continues to insist it wasn’t in on the “prank,” even as it has announced that the work—still half-shredded—will return to auction on Oct. 14 with an estimate of £4 million to £6 million.
“Honestly, there was no involvement on our side,” says Emma Baker, a contemporary art specialist at Sotheby’s in London. “It’s just become an iconic image now that’s so ubiquitous in culture. You see it everywhere.”
If the sale achieves its high estimate, the painting will have appreciated nearly 500% in almost three years.
And while other works by Banksy have sold for more—a record of $23 million was set in March at Christie’s with an oil painting of a child playing with a nurse doll—the painting, which was initially titled Girl with Balloon (2006) and which the artist renamed Love is in the Bin (2018) after it was shredded, carries the highest pre-sale estimate ever placed on his pieces.
“If you look at Banksy’s market since the shredding incident, there’s been a massive change in the value of work sold at auction,” says Baker. “It’s the highest estimate ever placed on a work by Banksy, but if you look at the actual results achieved by Banksy, it still feels quite attractive and conservative.”
The 18 most-expensive works by Banksy to sell at auction have all occurred since the shredding incident. Just one of those 18 sold in 2019, according to Artnet’s price database; the rest sold in 2020 or 2021.
“The market for Banksy’s work has undergone such a dramatic change,” says Baker. “It will be a real test.”
An Anonymous Seller
The 2018 buyer of the work was an unnamed European collector, who made news when she announced through the auction house that she would go ahead with the sale.
After the auction, she allowed Sotheby’s to show it in an impromptu exhibition. “About 5,000 people came through our doors to see it,” Baker says. “It was quite incredible.”
The work was subsequently loaned to a private museum in Baden-Baden, Germany, and then placed on “long-term loan” to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart in 2019.
Baker says that immediately after the sale, technicians from Pest Control, the name of Banksy’s authentication body, disabled the shredder. “It no longer functions,” she says. “The mechanics are still inside but it’s been completely deactivated, so it won’t happen again.”
To contact the author of this story: James Tarmy in New York at [email protected]
This means, you take one article, and you use the article distribution system. It will generate thousands of unique versions of your article, and publish those unique articles to hundreds of websites that are related to your niche.
Take a look at our comprehensive guide to the best and most popular information ebooks and products available today on Detoxing, Colon Cleansing, Weight Loss and Dating and Romance. They are all in one spot, easy to find and compere to make a quick selection for the product that best fits your needs or wants.
So browse through a category and make your preferred selection and come back here to read more choice articles and get a few more helpful tips on ways to help your enhancement.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. “saubiosaubiosuccess.com is a participant in third party affiliate and advertising programs; The Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, Awin network, and other affiliate advertising programs are designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees and commissions by advertising and linking to products on other sites and on Amazon.com. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc, or its affiliates.”
We use anonymous cookies and various 3rd-party services to optimise and to offer you a better, more personalised, browsing experience with advanced accessibility enhancements.
Dismiss
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
