"We have just received Banksy-ed": jagged works after Sotheby's auction

Participants at a Sotheby's auction in London witnessed a complex Banksy farce on Friday when a famous painting was "shredded spontaneously" shortly after the end of the sale.

"Girl With Balloon" has reached a final selling price of £ 1,042,000, which includes a premium of the buyer. The winning bid was forwarded over the phone as a result of what the Financial Times described as a "quick bidding period".

Banksy's Girl With Balloon, which shows a black-and-white girl who tends or drops a red balloon, was previously estimated at between £ 200,000 and £ 300,000 per Sotheby's website.

Shortly after the winning auction, the artwork was shredded into pieces through an alarm triggered inside the frame. "It would appear that we had just received Banksy-ed," said Alex Branczik, head of contemporary art for Europe at Sotheby's, according to an article in Art Newspaper.

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The play says that Branczik told participants that he had never "experienced a situation in which a painting had been shredded spontaneously when he made a record for the artist."

It is possible that Banksy triggered the alarm and destroyed his own painting. The Art Newspaper mentions a man wearing "black sports sunglasses" who "jostled with security" after the destruction, which could have been the famous street artist.

Sotheby's Branczik apparently tried to turn the situation around positively. "You could argue that work is now more valuable," he said in the Art Newspaper.

Sotheby's did not respond to a request for comment from MarketWatch.

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