Banksy's Self-Shredding Painting Sold Three Years Later for 18 Times the Price

On the evening of October 5, 2018, Sotheby's London held a contemporary art sale. The last lot was a Banksy from 2006, Girl with Balloon, in a heavy gilt frame supplied by the artist. A telephone bidder won at £1,042,000. As the gavel came down, an alarm sounded, the lower half of the canvas began sliding through a slot at the bottom of the frame, and a hidden shredder cut it into vertical strips. The crowd's reaction is on video. So is the auctioneer's, which is the part Banksy probably enjoyed most.

The mechanism had been there for twelve years. Banksy later released footage showing he had built it into the frame around 2006 and quietly written into his estate's contracts that the work should never leave its frame, in case it ever went to auction. The plan was a complete shred, top to bottom. In rehearsals, Banksy said, "it worked every time." On the night, the shredder jammed about halfway through, leaving the upper portion of the canvas intact and the lower half ribboned out the bottom — visually, somehow better than the original.

Sotheby's allowed the buyer to keep the partially-destroyed work, which Banksy's authentication body Pest Control re-titled Love is in the Bin. Three years later, on October 14, 2021, Sotheby's auctioned it again. The presale estimate was £4–6 million. It hammered at £18,582,000, an artist record by a wide margin. The piece is, as far as anyone can tell, the first artwork to deliberately destroy itself at auction and the first to multiply in price as a result.