Laughing all the way to the Banksy: £18.6m for shredded artwork

A BANKSY picture, which was half sliced by a shredder concealed in its frame when it was first sold at auction, fetched £18.6 million (about R375m) when it went back under the hammer in the same room in London on Thursday.

Onlookers gasped when the thentitled Girl with Balloon was sucked into a shredder as the hammer fell following a bid of £1 042 000 at a 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 in 2018.

Now called Love is in the Bin, the work sold for more than three times the top end of its £4m to £6m price estimate and was 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. |