The British street artist Banksy appeared to pull off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, with a frame that shredded his \u201cGirl With a Balloon\u201d after it sold.<\/b>
\nLONDON \u2014 The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby\u2019s in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction.
The work, \u201cGirl With a Balloon,\u201d a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby\u2019s \u201cFrieze Week\u201d evening contemporary art sale. It was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby\u2019s.
\u201cThen we heard an alarm go off,\u201d Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm the Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. \u201cEveryone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame.\u201d
The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby\u2019s staff members, had been shredded by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame.
Ms. Long said that she next saw a \u201cman with a detonator\u201d being removed from the building by Sotheby\u2019s security staff.
\u201cWe\u2019ve been Banksy-ed,\u201d Alex Branczik, Sotheby\u2019s head of contemporary art in Europe, said at news conference afterward.
\u201cI\u2019ll be quite honest,\u201d Mr. Branczik continued, \u201cwe have not experienced this situation the past, where a painting is spontaneously shredded upon achieving a record for the artist.\u201d
Mr. Branczik added that he was \u201cnot in on the ruse.\u201d
Sotheby\u2019s has not named the client whose $1.4 million purchase has been destroyed. International auction houses do not divulge the identities of their buyers unless the buyer requests it.
But Sotheby\u2019s said in a statement on Saturday: \u201cThe successful bidder was a private collector, bidding through a Sotheby\u2019s staff member on the phone. We are currently in discussions about next steps.\u201d
Joanna Brooks, the director of JBPR, who answers media enquiries on behalf of Banksy, declined to comment on whether the artist himself had been removed from the salesroom.
An image of the shredding, showing the shocked faces of those at the auction, appeared on Banksy\u2019s Instagram account .
It had attracted 301,000 likes by Saturday afternoon.
But suspicious minds wondered whether Sotheby\u2019s was completely taken by surprise. Anyone in the auction house who handled the painting would have surely noticed a mechanism on the back of the frame. Unusually, this relatively small Banksy had been hung on a wall, rather placed by porters on a podium for the moment of sale. And the artwork was also the last lot in the auction.
\u201cIf it had been offered earlier in the sale, it would have caused disruption and sellers would have complained about that,\u201d Ms. Long said. \u201cAnd Sotheby\u2019s let a man with a bag with a detonator into the building. They must have known.\u201d
For more than a decade, Banksy has created headlines with his daring, politically subversive artistic stunts. In 2005, the artist hung one of his \u201cmodified canvases,\u201d showing a 19th-century beauty wearing a 20th-century gas mask, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for two hours.
The prank was one of several recorded in his best-selling book \u201cWall and Piece.\u201d The following year, he left an inflatable doll dressed as a Guant\u00e1namo Bay prisoner in Disneyland.
The identity of the artist remains a secret. In 2008, the newspaper The Mail on Sunday suggested that Banksy was in fact Robin Gunningham, who was born in Bristol in the west of England and dropped out of private school at age 16 to dabble in street art, a theory for which academic researchers have found corroboration. Banksy and the Gunningham family in Bristol have denied the connection.
\u201cWe never comment on identity issues,\u201d said Ms. Brooks, Banksy\u2019s public relations manager.
As the artwork shredded itself, a seemingly unperturbed Mr. Barker, the auctioneer and Sotheby\u2019s European chairman, said, \u201cIt\u2019s a brilliant Banksy moment, this. You couldn\u2019t make it up, could you?\u201d
It was an unexpected finale \u2014 at least to those in the room \u2014 to a $90 million auction in which \u201cPropped,\u201d a monumental 1992 canvas of female nude by the Scottish painter Jenny Saville, sold for \u00a39.5 million, or about $12.4 million, setting an auction high for an artwork by a living female artist.<\/p>\n

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