Banksy's Iconic Shredded Artwork 'Love is in the Bin' Auctioned for Nearly €19 Million: Three Times as Much as Expected

Love is in the Bin, the partly shredded artwork by Banksy, went under the hammer tonight for no less than 16 million pounds (just under 19 million euros) at an auction of Sotheby’s auction house in London. With the fee for the auction house added, the total amount comes to 18,582,000 pounds (just under 22 million euros). That is much more than expected. It was initially estimated that the work would fetch between four and six million pounds (4.7 to 7.1 million euros).

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kv

14 Oct. 2021

Latest update:
20:23

Source:
Reuters, own reporting

Spectators were shocked when the artwork Girl with Balloon shortly after it was sold at an auction in October 2018, it was partially shredded live before the eyes of the public, built into the frame of the painting. The buyer had just paid 1,045,000 British pounds (1.23 million euros) for the piece.

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The work was subsequently given the new title Love is in the Bin and was put up for sale again today. The artwork was expected to fetch many times what the buyer had paid for it at the time, but the final offer of £16 million exceeded expectations. “I’m afraid to drop this hammer,” joked the auctioneer, fearing the painting might hold more surprises. Luckily they didn’t.

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“Some people think it wasn’t really shredded. It did. Some people think the auction house was involved, it wasn’t,” Banksy, whose identity is a closely guarded secret, wrote on Instagram in 2018.

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anti-art

According to Sotheby’s, this is about anti-art, just like Marcel Duchamps Fontaine, a porcelain urinal he mounted on a pedestal in 1917, or like a work by Ai Weiwei, who photographed himself in 1995 deliberately dropping an alleged urn of the Chinese Han Dynasty.

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“Then Girl with Balloon ‘destroying itself’ in our retail space, Banksy unleashed a global sensation that has since grown into a cultural phenomenon,” said Alex Branczik, president of the modern and contemporary art division at Sotheby’s. “On that memorable night, Banksy didn’t so much destroy a work of art by shredding it, but instead created one.” The new Love is in the Bin is anti-establishment art, it sounds.

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