Maybe the whole thing is a set up. This includes the buyer. Great publicity for the auction house. No money actually changes hands. The painting itself could be a fake done by the artist himself.
Yeah. It is a clever stunt, but I can't see it being done without being a set up.
The original buyer (or the people hanging the work for the buyer) would likely have noticed something strange. Because the frame is not unique to the work, it would not be unusual for the buyer to have the work put in another frame.
The original buyer may have never sold it, or may have only sold it through a private sale rather than an auction house. If Bansky sold a bunch of these to increase the possibility of one coming up for auction, that would greatly increase the likelihood that the shedder in one of them would be discovered.
Bansky would have to have someone monitoring all auctions of his work around the world for the past 12 years to make sure that if this one came up for auction he would have someone there to activate the shedder.
The shedder would have to work without a dead or corroded battery or other damage that might have occurred to the device over the past 12 years.
Sotheby’s surely would have carefully examined the work for authenticity and any damage. The oddities required to put a shedder in the frame would not have gone unnoticed.
Bansky and Sotheby’s and the person who activated the shedder could get in lots of legal trouble if this were not a set up.
The original buyer/seller is not identified. The buyer was anonymous. The price paid was well above the estimated value.
The person running the camera focused on the work at the time the shredding began. The camera could easily have been on the phone buyer, auctioneer, or the crowd. Instead, it had the work perfectly framed.
The auction workers just casually take down the drawing. They aren’t frantically trying to stop the shredding or save the work. They aren’t afraid of what else it might do or if it might explode or something.
It only did large straight cuts on half the drawing. It can be moved back into the frame and still be presented. It wasn’t actually destroyed.
It is a somewhat neat idea, although I don't like the dishonesty in the way it must have been pulled off.
I once did a series of destroyed drawings. I made drawings and then destroyed and re-presented them in different ways. The images of the drawing referred to the way the physical drawing would be destroyed, or recreated or presented in its destroyed form. Some of them were self-destructing where I put different chemicals on the paper that would cause them to fall apart or become corroded with certain patterns or lines.
