Banksy work shreds after sale
British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby’s in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction.
The work, “Girl With Balloon,” a 2006 spray paint on canvas was hammered down by auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and an auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby’s.
“Then we heard an alarm go off,” Morgan
Long, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said. “Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame.”
The painting had been shredded by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame. Long said that she next saw a man being removed from the building by Sotheby’s security staff.
“We’ve been Banksy-ed,” Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in Europe, said at a news conference afterward.
Branczik added that he was “not in on the ruse.”
But suspicious minds wondered whether Sotheby’s was completely taken by surprise. Anyone in the auction house who handled the painting would have surely noticed a mechanism on the back of the frame. And the artwork was also the last lot in the auction.
“If it had been offered earlier in the sale, it would have caused disruption and sellers would have complained about that,” Long said. “And Sotheby’s let a man with a bag into the building. They must have known.”
— New York Times
Kardashian sues guard over robbery
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West is suing a former security guard over an incident in Paris in which she was bound and robbed of jewelry that was worth millions of dollars.
The News Journal reported Friday that West and an insurance company filed the suit in New Castle County Superior Court in Wilmington, Del. It alleges negligence and misconduct and demands $6.1 million.
Court documents name Pascal Duvier and his company Protect Security Inc. as the defendants.
The lawsuit states that armed men stormed West’s Paris hotel room in 2016. Insurer AIG Property Casualty Co. paid out $6.1 million to cover the losses.
The lawsuit claims that Duvier failed to address several security breaches at the hotel, including a missing or broken lock on the hotel’s courtyard gate.
— Associated Press
Turner’s husband gives her a kidney
Tina Turner has revealed that she underwent a kidney transplant with an organ donated by her husband.
The
78-yearold singer says in an upcoming autobiography that she has suffered from kidney disease, and by 2016 her kidneys were at “20 percent and plunging rapidly.”
She says her husband, Erwin Bach, “shocked me by saying that he wanted to give me one of his kidneys.” Turner says she was “overwhelmed by the enormity of his offer.”
Turner writes that afterward she felt “happy, overwhelmed and relieved that we’d come through this alive.”
Turner, whose hits include “Proud Mary” and “What’s Love Got to do With It?,” married German music executive Bach in 2013 after a long relationship.
Extracts from “Tina Turner: My Love Story” were published Saturday in the Daily Mail newspaper.
— Associated Press