Recall that this work itself seconds after the hammer fell, self-destructed while hanging on the wall in Sotheby's packed auction room.
Hailed as “Banksy's greatest work” by The Guardian and predicted by the BBC as a painting “that will become one of the most significant works of art of the early 21st century”, Love is in the Bin has sparked over 30.000 news stories global and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Recognized around the world, the viral image has generated numerous memes and has become the subject of political cartoonists, while brands such as McDonald's, Perrier and IKEA have appropriated the Banksy painting for their advertisements, products and logos – the latest which posted a how-to shred -DIY guide on the company's Instagram
Love is in the Bin fits firmly into the long history of anti-art, from the anonymous submission of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, a porcelain urinal remounted on a pedestal in 1917; to Robert Rauschenberg who erased a pencil drawing by Willem de Kooning and renamed the work Erased de Kooning Drawing; to Ai Wei Wei who destroyed a purported Han Dynasty urn, photographing himself intentionally dropping it to probe the larger question of what we consider valuable.
And if in 2018, Sotheby's joined a long and illustrious list of art institutions subject to the artistic hand of Banksy. Previous events include the installation of an idyllic pastoral oil painting of a crime scene cordoned off with police tape on the wall of Tate Britain in 2003; a yellow Mona Lisa with a smiley face that appeared on a wall in the Louvre in 2004; and a faux cave painting, depicting a stick figure pushing a shopping trolley, that spent three days unauthorized on display at the British Museum in 2005. The following year, a life-size inflatable prisoner of Guantanamo dressed in an orange jumpsuit appeared at Disneyland, ahead of the artist's debut and groundbreaking US exhibition in Los Angeles. Banksy is no stranger to extraordinary events in Sotheby's New Bond Street some fourteen years earlier, in 2004, Banksy with another work of a gangster rat on the gallery wall during the exhibition preview of Damien Hirst's Pharmacy Sale.
*During the Sotheby's auction, Girl with Balloon (as the painting was then known) sold for £1 million / $1,4 million (estimate £200.000-300.000), an auction record for the artist at all era.
