Shredded painting is now worth double

PARIS — When street artist Banksy destroyed one of his works of art last week seconds after it was sold at auction, he probably added to its value, with some experts suggesting it could now be worth double its original price.

No one knows how the secretive artist activated a shredder hidden within the frame of his painting Girl with

Balloon just after it was sold last week by Sotheby’s for $1.4 million.

The maverick British artist posted a video on Instagram in the wake of the prank accompanied by a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso — “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge”.

He said he had fitted the shredder in case the painting should ever be put up for auction — where its final price set a joint record for his work.

“Banksy might think that by destroying his art he’s undermining capitalists who buy it, but he’s wrong,” commented Mikael Faujour of the specialist French art magazine Artension.

“The leftovers from this destruction will acquire a new prestige and additional monetary worth,” he said.

Thierry Ehrmann, who heads Artprice, a firm which closely monitors art market prices, agreed that the prank had probably increased the value of the work.

It might now be worth “more than two million euros”, he suggested.

“It’s a performance in the line of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Ready Made’,” he said speaking of a term coined by the French artist in 1915 to describe a sometimes modified, but always common object, not usually thought of as a work of art.

“Banksy reminds people that, even in a prominent auction, all his art is fleeting,” he added.

Piece of art history

Arnaud Oliveux, an expert at the Artcurial auction house in Paris, suggested Banksy was careful not to destroy the whole of his painting.

Because it is only partially shredded, “it becomes something else, egged on by the social media buzz” and acquires the aura of “an iconic work of art”, he said.

The auction house revealed on Thursday that the modified Banksy has since been renamed as Love is in the Bin, and certified by Pest Control, the artist’s authentication body.

“When the hammer came down last week and the work was shredded, I was at first shocked, but gradually I began to realize that I would end up with my own piece of art history,” said the buyer, an unnamed female European collector.