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‘Urge to destroy is also a creative urge’: Banksy shares details of auction shredding prank (VIDEO)
Famous street artist Banksy has published a video, revealing how he secretly built a shredder into one of his paintings years ago and showing the moment it got ripped to shreds, after selling at auction for $1.1mn at Sotheby’s.
“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge,” wrote Banksy, citing a leading anarchist theorist of the nineteenth century, Mikhail Bakunin, but attributing the quote to the famous painter Pablo Picasso.
'We’ve been Banksy’d!' Balloon girl self-destructs on fetching $1.3mn at Sotheby’s auction (VIDEOS)
In his Instagram post, Banksy explained that he built the secret device and embedded it into the painting’s frame “a few years ago”, just “in case it was ever put up for auction.” Such forethought paid off Friday, when the artist’s ‘Girl with a Balloon’ fetched a record of £860,000 (£1.04mn or $1.37mn with buyer's premium) at a Contemporary Art Evening Auction at Sotheby's London – and got destroyed the moment the hammer dropped.
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