The Self-Shredding Painting That Set Banksy's Auction Record

Banksy's Love is in the Bin (2018) sold for $25.45m (£18.58m) at Sotheby's in London on October 14, 2021. The unique work, in its current form, had not been traded before.

In 2018, Banksy’s spray-painted image of a girl with a balloon began to self-destruct at Sotheby's when it had just sold for $1.2m. The machinery hidden in its frame stopped shredding halfway through the image, a malfunction that was the making of the publicity stunt, and the work.

The artist quipped on instagram that it had worked perfectly in rehersals. Sotheby's denied being complicit in the prank.

Re-titled Love is in the Bin, the work went on show at Museum Frieder Burda in 2019, followed by Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie, a temporary loan that turned it from a novelty into a museum piece.

The spray paint and acrylic on canvas is contained by an ornate frame, which houses a decommissioned, remote controlled shredding mechanism.

The sale beat Banksy’s previous auction record by $2.44m, a 10% rise. The previous record was set by Game Changer (2020), which sold for $23.01m at Christie's on March 23, 2021. The work had not been traded before.

It is the original of a Banksy work installed in University Hospital Southampton in the South of England in May 2020 during the first wave of the Covid pandemic. Proceeds from the sale went to support the hospital along with other health organisations and charities across the UK.

A Brief History of Banksy at Auction