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Onlookers gasped when the then-titled "Girl
with Balloon" was sucked into a shredder as the hammer fell
following a bid of 1,042,000 pounds at an October 2018 auction
at Sotheby's in London.
"Some people think it didn't really shred. It did. Some people
think the auction house was in on it, they weren't,"
the street artist, whose identity is a closely guarded secret,
said on Instagram in 2018.
Now called "Love is in the Bin", the work sold for 18,582,000
pounds, more than three times the top end of its 4-6 million
pound price estimate and an auction record for the artist.
"I can't tell you how terrified I am to bring down this hammer,"
joked Sotheby's auctioneer Oliver Barker after 10 minutes of
bidding.
Sotheby's said the work fitted into an illustrious history of
anti-art including Marcel Duchamp's anonymous submission of
Fountain, a porcelain urinal remounted on a pedestal in 1917, to
Ai Weiwei, who photographed himself intentionally dropping an
alleged Han Dynasty urn.
"When Girl with Balloon 'self-destructed' in our saleroom,
Banksy sparked a global sensation that has since become a
cultural phenomenon," said Alex Branczik, Sotheby's chairman of
modern and contemporary art.
"During that memorable night, Banksy did not so much destroy an
artwork by shredding it, but instead created one. Today this
piece is considered heir to a venerated legacy of
anti-establishment art."
($1 = 0.7310 pounds)
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Kylie MacLellan; Editing by
Jane Merriman and Nick Macfie)
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