Banksy's Girl with Balloon shredded itself on 5 October 2018, seconds after it sold at Sotheby's in London for £1,042,000. A shredder hidden in the frame cut the canvas into strips as it slid out of the bottom. Renamed Love is in the Bin, the half shredded work later sold for far more.
Banksy said he had built the shredder into the frame a few years earlier. The buyer, a European collector and long standing Sotheby's client, kept what was left.
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Most accounts treat the half shredded picture as the point of the stunt: a girl still holding her balloon above a curtain of paper strips. Banksy's own video suggests it was not.
A few days after the sale he posted Shred the Love, the Director's Cut. It shows a hooded figure building the shredder in a workshop, then a test in which a print goes through the blades completely, with nothing left of it. A caption reads: "In rehearsals it worked every time." Press accounts of the video spoke of a jam that stopped the machine halfway on the night.
So the version that sold again three years later for almost eighteen times its price, with half the girl still hanging in the frame, was apparently not the one Banksy planned.
What You'll Discover
Who pressed the button.
What the buyer did next.
What one certificate changed.
Where the wreck was hung.
What the wreck fetched next.