New York Times:
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.”
This is a fascinating story. Did Sotheby’s know it was going to happen? Is the art destroyed? Has it become more valuable? What a great stunt.
A beautiful work itself.
A big finger to the bollocks.
Kinda hard to miss the weight and imbalance of an embedded shredding mechanism when hanging a framed print in an auction gallery, no? I think Sotheby’s knew and happily participated.
They probably did. And I reckon the buyer won’t mind too much, this work is now 100 times more famous than it was before.
Surely it had to be triggered by someone in the room. How else would they know when to shred it?
Or someone was on the phone to someone and said, “Now…” and they triggered it remotely?
Could it be that the artist himself was in the room at the time and triggered it?
So many questions.
Great work once again Banksy.
Exactly.