Skip to main content

Banksy artwork self-destructs after it auctions for $1.4 million

Sotheby's, October 5th 2018

One of Banksy’s best known works of art ended up going through a shredder on Friday, October 5, just seconds after it auctioned for a whopping $1.4 million.

Recommended Videos

As the auctioneer’s hammer came down on Banksy’s Girl With Balloon stencil at Sotheby’s in London, the artwork began making a strange noise, catching the attention of those gathered in the room. What happened next took everyone by surprise.

The picture began passing slowly through a shredder built into the frame, ruining it for whoever had just made the winning bid. About halfway through, the machine stopped operating, leaving a portion of the artwork in shreds dangling below the frame. The rest of it remained intact, still inside the frame.

Two officials from Sotheby’s quickly stepped in to remove the picture from the wall as it dawned on those in the room that this was exactly how Banksy had planned for the auction to end. Whether anyone at the auction was in on the prank isn’t clear, though it seems likely that someone close by activated the shredder remotely.

Banksy’s Girl With Balloon before it was shredded. Image used with permission by copyright holder

Banksy, whose identity has never been officially revealed, later posted a video on his YouTube channel in which he appeared to offer an explanation for his latest stunt.

The video (above) begins by showing a message from the artist — “A few years ago I secretly put a shredder into a painting in case it was ever put up for auction” — followed by a clip of the shredder being installed into the frame, and footage of the moment Girl With Balloon begins to pass through the shredder.

“In a moment that caught everyone in the room by surprise, Banksy’s Girl with Balloon self-destructed just as the final hammer signaled the end of an evening of auctions in London,” Sotheby’s wrote in a post on its website. “The work sold for 1,042,000 British pounds ($1.4 million), tying the artist’s record in pounds at auction previously achieved in 2008.”

Sotheby’s added that the unexpected incident “certainly marks the first time in auction history that a work of art automatically shredded itself after coming under the hammer.”

Now the art world is wondering if the person who bid $1.4 million for Girl With Balloon still wants it, though it’s possible that as the shredding stunt was Banksy’s doing, the artwork could now be worth even more than when it was in one piece.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Google Gemini’s best AI tricks finally land on Microsoft Copilot
Copilot app for Mac

Microsoft’s Copilot had a rather splashy AI upgrade fest at the company’s recent event. Microsoft made a total of nine product announcements, which include the agentic trick called Actions, Memory, Vision, Pages, Shopping, and Copilot Search. 

A healthy few have already appeared on rival AI products such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, alongside much smaller players like Perplexity and browser-maker Opera. However, two products that have found some vocal fan-following with Gemini and ChatGPT have finally landed on the Copilot platform. 

Read more
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more