Banksy Artwork Self-Destructs At Auction Right After Being Sold For $1.3 Million (cbsnews.com)

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: Elusive street artist Banksy's famous "Girl With Balloon" artwork was on sale at a Sotheby's auction in New York inside what looked like a normal, if slightly old fashioned painting frame. As soon as the auction concluded — the artwork was sold to a bidder for a cool $1.3 Million — a whirring noise started coming from the artwork hanging on the wall, and "Girl With Ballon" started moving down inside its frame, coming out the bottom of the frame in shredded strips. In what must be an art world first, the artwork suddenly self-shredded in front of hundreds of stunned auction attendants. It appears that — somehow — Banksy or some other prankster installed a battery powered paper shredding mechanism in the bottom of the artwork's frame that can be remotely triggered. In a tweet on his Twitter account, Banksy posted an image of the destructed artwork and wrote "Going, gone, gone...", potentially mocking the practice of auctioning famous artworks off for large sums of money. The question now is precisely what — if anything — the buyer of the artwork gets for his or her money, and whether "Girl With Balloon" is worth more or less than before now.

Comments

Re:Amazing part

[FilmedInNoir]

I'm amazed you can't use Google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: Art experts say it is worth 2x shredded

[jpaine619]

like a famous gun that killed someone

Nope.. A gun might be used to kill someone, but the gun, itself, doesn't kill anyone.

Yes, there is a difference.