London Ap Art Prankster Banksy Has Struck Again
Banksy Painting Cocky-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 One thousand thousand at Sotheby's
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LONDON — The British street artist Banksy pulled off i of his most spectacular pranks on Fri night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby's in London after selling for $one.iv million at auction.
The work, "Girl With Balloon," a 2006 spray pigment on canvas, was the concluding lot of Sotheby'due south "Frieze Week" evening contemporary art auction. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down past the auctioneer Oliver Barker for ane million pounds, more than three times the gauge and a new sale loftier for a piece of work solely by the artist, co-ordinate to Sotheby's.
"Then we heard an alarm become off," Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based informational firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Sabbatum. "Everyone turned round, and the motion picture had slipped through its frame."
The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby'due south staff members, had been shredded, or at least partially shredded, past a remote-control machinery on the back of the frame.
A photo posted on the private Instagram account of Caroline Lang, the chairman of Sotheby's Switzerland, showed a man in the salesroom operating an electronic device subconscious inside a handbag. Ms. Long said that she subsequently saw a homo being removed from the edifice by Sotheby'south security staff.
"Nosotros've been Banksy-ed," Alex Branczik, Sotheby's caput of contemporary art in Europe, said at a news conference afterward.
"I'll exist quite honest," Mr. Branczik continued, "we have non experienced this state of affairs in the past, where a painting is spontaneously shredded upon achieving a tape for the artist."
Mr. Branczik added that he was "not in on the ruse."
Sotheby'due south has not named the customer whose $i.4 million purchase was destroyed. International auction houses exercise not divulge the identities of their buyers unless the person requests information technology.
But Sotheby's said in a statement on Sabbatum: "The successful applicant was a private collector, bidding through a Sotheby's staff fellow member on the telephone. We are currently in discussions about next steps."
[The winning bidder for the painting says she'll keep information technology .]
Joanna Brooks, the managing director of JBPR, who answers media enquiries on behalf of Banksy, declined to comment on whether the creative person himself had been removed from the salesroom.
On Saturday afternoon Banksy posted a video on his Instagram account, recording the confusion at Sotheby's auction, following a sequence purporting to show the artist hiding a shredder inside a gilt-forest pic frame.
"A few years ago I secretly built a shredder into a painting," Banksy wrote in the video. "In case it was ever put up for auction." Past Sat afternoon, the video had attracted about two million views.
Sotheby's did non divulge the identity of the seller. According to the itemize, "Daughter With Balloon" had been "acquired directly from the artist past the nowadays owner in 2006."
But suspicious minds wondered whether Sotheby's was completely taken past surprise.
The frame would presumably have been rather heavy and thick for its size, something an sale house specialist or art handler might take noticed. Detailed condition reports are routinely requested by the would-be buyers of high-value artworks. Unusually, this relatively small Banksy had been hung on a wall, rather than placed by porters on a podium for the moment of sale. And the artwork was besides the last lot in the auction.
"If it had been offered earlier in the sale, information technology would have caused disruption and sellers would have complained about that," Ms. Long said. "And Sotheby'south let a homo with a purse into the edifice. They must have known."
For more than than a decade, Banksy has created headlines with his daring, politically subversive artistic stunts. In 2005, the creative person hung one of his "modified canvases," showing a 19th-century beauty wearing a 20th-century gas mask, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 2 hours.
The prank was one of several recorded in his best-selling book "Wall and Slice." The following year, he left an inflatable doll dressed every bit a Guantánamo Bay prisoner in Disneyland.
The identity of the artist remains a undercover. In 2008, the newspaper The Mail on Lord's day suggested that Banksy was in fact Robin Gunningham, who was born in Bristol in the westward of England and dropped out of private school at age 16 to dabble in street art, a theory for which academic researchers have found corroboration. Banksy and the Gunningham family in Bristol have denied the connection.
"Nosotros never annotate on identity issues," said Ms. Brooks, Banksy's public relations director.
As the artwork shredded itself, a seemingly unperturbed Mr. Barker, the auctioneer and Sotheby's European chairman, said, "It's a brilliant Banksy moment, this. You lot couldn't make it upward, could yous?"
It was an unexpected finale — at least to those in the room — to a $ninety million auction in which "Propped," a monumental 1992 canvas of a female nude by the Scottish painter Jenny Saville, sold for £ix.5 million, or most $12.4 meg, setting an auction loftier for an artwork by a living female creative person.
Perhaps the shredded "Girl With Airship" might somewhen likewise prove a lucrative investment.
Banksy pronounced the painting "going, going, gone" on his Instagram account, quoting Picasso: "The urge to destroy is as well a creative urge." (The quote is often attributed to Picasso, but also to Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who died v years earlier Picasso was built-in.)
Just the painting was neatly shredded and could easily be backed on some other canvas by a competent conservator. Thanks to the publicity of this stunt, could the painting at present be even more desirable as a piece of auction history?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/arts/design/uk-banksy-painting-sothebys.html
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