The Banksy artwork which shredded itself has just sold for a cool £18.5m

Virgin Radio

15 Oct 2021, 11:42

You’d think that putting a piece of art through a shredder would decrease its value, but the opposite is true of Banksy’s iconic Love is in the Bin.

We all remember how the anonymous character trolled the art world back in 2018, when, just after his piece Girl with Balloon was sold at auction for £1million, alarms sounded and the canvas dropped through a hidden shredder built into the bottom of the frame. Well, now the artwork, over half of which hangs shredded, has just gone under the hammer at Sotheby's in London on Thursday, and it sold for an absolute packet.

The guide price was somewhere between £4million and £6million, but it ended up going for a whopping £16million. Once you add the buyer's premium, the auction winner ended up forking out £18,582,000.

As reported by the BBC, auctioneer Oliver Barker said, before he started the bidding, that the piece was an "unexpected piece of performance art".

With the bidding starting at £2.5m, numerous offers saw the value shoot up, until eventually a private bidder secured the artwork for £16million.

Auctioneer Oliver Barker then provided some top art banter by saying: “I can't tell you how terrified I am to bring down this hammer,” and admitting that he was relieved the artwork was “still there”.

Alex Branczik, Sotheby's head of modern and contemporary art, said (via Daily Mail) that, by shredding his work, Banksy “sparked a global sensation that has since become a cultural phenomenon.”

He added: “During that memorable night, Banksy did not so much destroy an artwork by shredding it, but instead created one. Today this piece is considered heir to a venerated legacy of anti-establishment art.”

The piece had been on permanent loan to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart Museum in Germany since March 2019.