Love Is in the Bin

In one of the most audacious acts in modern art history, Banksy's Love Is in the Bin was born the moment the gavel fell at Sotheby's London on October 5, 2018. Seconds after the anonymous street artist's 2006 spray-paint-and-acrylic work Girl with Balloon sold for £1,042,000, a shredder hidden inside the elaborate gilt frame partially destroyed the canvas, sending strips of the lower half cascading out of the bottom. The stunt, which Banksy had planned years in advance by building a battery-powered shredding mechanism into the frame, stunned the auction room and was instantly broadcast around the world.

The buyer, a European collector, chose to keep the partially shredded work, which was authenticated and renamed Love Is in the Bin by Banksy's authentication body, Pest Control. The piece has been on permanent loan to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany since March 2019. In October 2021, it returned to Sotheby's and sold for £18,582,000 (approximately $25.4 million), setting a new auction record for the artist. The work stands as a landmark commentary on the commodification of art, the power dynamics of the auction system, and the ironic reality that an act of destruction only increased the object's market value.