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LONDON – British street-artist Banksy performed one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night. One of his brand paintings appeared to be self-destructing at Sotheby's in London after selling for $ 1.4 million at auction.
The work "Girl With a Balloon", a painting on canvas in 2006, was the last batch of Sotheby's contemporary art sale "Frieze Week". It was hammered by auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction for a work done solely by the artist, according to Sotheby's.
"We then heard the alarm sound," said Saturday in an interview Morgan Long, head of investment in the art of the London-based Fine Art Group, sitting in the front row of the room. "Everyone went back and the picture had slipped through its frame."
The painting, mounted on a wall near a row of Sotheby's staff, had been shredded by a remote control mechanism located at the back of the frame.
Ms. Long said she later saw a "man with a detonator" being removed from the building by Sotheby's security agents.
"We are in the bank," said Alex Branczik, head of Sotheby's contemporary art in Europe, at a press conference.
"I will be perfectly honest," continued Branczik. "We did not experience this situation in the past, where a painting is spontaneously torn when it makes a record for the artist."
Mr. Branczik added that he was "not involved in the trick".
Sotheby's did not name the customer whose $ 1.4 million purchase was destroyed. International auction houses do not disclose the identity of their buyers unless the buyer asks them to do so.
Sotheby's, however, said in a statement Saturday, "The successful bidder was a private collector, who was on the phone through a Sotheby's staff member. We are currently discussing the next steps. "
Joanna Brooks, director of JBPR, who answers media questions on behalf of Banksy, declined to say whether the artist himself had been removed from the auction room.
An image of the shredding, showing the shocked faces of those at the auction, appeared on Banksy's Instagram account.
It had attracted 301,000 people by Saturday afternoon.
But the suspicious minds wondered if Sotheby's was completely caught off guard. Anyone in the auction house who manipulated the painting would surely have noticed a mechanism behind the frame. Unusually, this relatively small Banksy had been hanging on a wall, rather placed by porters on a podium for the time of sale. And the artwork was also the last batch of the auction.
"If it had been proposed earlier in the sale, it would have caused disruption and vendors would have complained about it," said Ms. Long. "And Sotheby's left a man with a bag with a detonator in the building. They had to know.
For more than a decade, Banksy has made one of his stuntmen with his artistic daring and subversive stunts on the political level. In 2005, the artist suspended at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for two hours, one of his "modified canvases," depicting a nineteenth-century beauty dressed in a gas mask of the XXth century.
The joke was one of the many videos of his best-seller "Wall and Piece". The following year, he had left an inflatable doll dressed Prisoner of Guantánamo Bay at Disneyland.
The identity of the artist remains a secret. In 2008, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported that Banksy was actually Robin Gunningham, born in Bristol in the West of England and who had left private school at the age of 16 years to get into street art, a theory for which university researchers found corroboration. Banksy and the Gunningham family in Bristol denied the connection.
"We never comment on identity issues," said Brooks, public relations manager for Banksy.
As the work shredded, Sotheby's auctioneer and European president Barker, seemingly unperturbed, said, "This is a brilliant moment for Banksy. You could not invent, is not it?
It was an unexpected finale – at least for those who were in the room – from a $ 90 million auction in which "Propped", a monumental canvas of 1992 nude made by the Scottish painter Jenny Saville was sold at 9.5 million pounds, or about 12.4 million dollars. set a high auction for a work of art by a living female artist.
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