Banksy’s Girl With Balloon Shredded Itself at Sotheby’s, Then Sold for £18.6 Million as Love Is in the Bin
Banksy had already spent a career humiliating the art market. On October 5, 2018 he did it from inside the market itself.
Seconds after the gavel fell at Sotheby’s London, a hidden shredder in the gilt frame of Girl with Balloon chewed the canvas from the bottom up and stopped halfway. The spray-paint and acrylic work had just sold for £1,042,000 including fees — about $1.4 million, tying Banksy’s then-auction record from 2008. Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in Europe, said the house had just been “Banksy-ed.”
Banksy posted the stunned salesroom on Instagram with the caption “Going, going, gone…” Pest Control, his authentication body, later recertified the half-destroyed canvas as a new work: Love Is in the Bin. Sotheby’s called it the first artwork in history created live during an auction.
The shredder was built into the frame before the painting ever left Banksy’s studio. A later video from the artist showed a battery-powered mechanism meant to swallow the whole canvas. It jammed. That jam is why the girl and the red heart balloon still hang in the top half of the frame, with a curtain of shredded strips below.
The 2018 buyer, a European collector, did not dump the piece. On October 14, 2021 the same Sotheby’s London room sold Love Is in the Bin again. After a ten-minute, nine-way bidding war it went for £18.6 million — about $25.4 million, more than 18 times the original hammer and a then-record for Banksy. The buyer was reported as a collector in Asia.
The shredded canvas has since traveled. Sotheby’s Hong Kong exhibited it ahead of a May 14, 2026 contemporary evening sale, putting the most famous auction prank of the century back in front of Asian bidders. Far from making the work unsellable, the stunt turned a $1.4 million stencil into one of the most expensive contemporary objects on earth.
The question The AEGIS Alliance asked the night of the shredding still stands, only the numbers changed: is the painting worth triple now? It was worth eighteen times.
For more from our Odd News desk, see the Subaru Forester whose Singapore trim spelled an F-bomb.
How the hell is that crap worth 1.4 million
Jim Pratt I’ve seen worse sell for more. Guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder…
Jacqueline Cansella all art sales are just money laundering. It has nothing to do with how good it is.
Stephen John Brace that would certainly make more sense than people paying vast sums for some of these pieces of “art”…