Works of art and picture frames are usually studied with care and attention prior to sales, they say. Banksy on Saturday posted a video to Instagram that showed footage of a shredding mechanism being built into a frame for, presumably, Girl with Red Balloon. According to a now-deleted video Banksy posted on his Instagram after the event, this was not meant to happen apparently In rehearsals it worked every time.

As soon as the painting was sold, an alarm went off and the painting shredded itself. Artwork created by the elusive artist Banksy that famously shredded itself during a 2018 auction just sold for a whopping 25.4 million Thursday, a record. Sotheby's claimed to have been surprised by Friday's auction prank, but some art experts have questioned how it was possible to pull it off without their knowledge. The painting stopped when it was around halfway through the shredder, leaving the top intact. British street artist Banksy built a shredder into a frame on his painting Girl With Balloon. Because it is only partially shredded, 'it becomes something else, egged on by the social media buzz' and acquires the aura of 'an iconic work of art,' he said.Īrtcurial will shortly auction three Banksy paintings, along with a resin-crafted figure of a rat holding a paintbrush signed by the artist. 'Banksy reminds people that, even in a prominent auction, all his art is fleeting,' he added.Īrnaud Oliveux, an expert at the Artcurial auction house Paris, suggested Banksy was careful not to destroy the whole of his painting. The nearly three-minute long video is titled, Shred the Love, the Director’s cut. 'It's a performance in the line of Marcel Duchamp's 'Ready Made',' he said speaking of a term coined by the French artist in 1915 to describe a sometimes modified, but always common object, not usually thought of as a work of art. It might now be worth 'more than two million euros,' he suggested. When a Banksy painting 'self-destructed' after selling at auction for 1.04 million (1.4 million) last week, it looked like the perfect stunt - one that caught.

Banksy painting shred video