Banksy says his shredding prank misfired

Banksy recently admitted that he had meant for the painting to be shredded completely.

British street artist Banksy stunned everyone at the Sotheby's auction in London when one of his paintings was partially shredded. The painting, 'Girl With Balloon', was part of Sotheby's contemporary art sale.
After it was successfully sold for $1.4 million to the highest bidder, an alarm went off catching audience's attention. In seconds the painting mounted on the wall was shredded, or at least partially shredded, by a mechanism inside the frame. Banksy recently admitted that he had meant for the painting to be shredded completely. That plan however, was foiled when the shredder unexpectedly jammed, the New York Times reports.
On Saturday, Banksy posted a video on his Instagram account, showing the confusion following the prank and purporting to show the artist hiding a shredder inside a gilt-wood picture frame. "A few years ago I secretly built a shredder into a painting," Banksy wrote in the video, adding, "In case it was ever put up for auction." By Saturday afternoon, the video has attracted nearly two million views.

 

 

 

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A post shared by Banksy (@banksy) on Oct 6, 2018 at 10:09am PDT

For more than a decade, Banksy has attracted attention with his daring, politically subversive artistic stunts. In 2005, the artist hung one of his "modified canvases," showing a 19th-century beauty wearing a 20th-century gas mask, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for two hours. The following year, he left an inflatable doll dressed as a Guantánamo Bay prisoner in Disneyland.