Exactly my line of thinking as well.
Either this was arranged with the auction house, the seller or the buyer, or all three. With Banksy.
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Was there any significance of the sale price? £953,829
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I thought perhaps that the frame concealed a mechanism to roll up the original, and at the same time feed out the shredded version to shock the crowd. But then it looks like it got stuck half way, so maybe it was a jammed shredder.
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The blades are mounted flat? How did that shred the canvas so easily?
Having a pre-shredded copy roll out of the bottom of the frame is likely easier to fabricate than a working shredder?
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I absolutely disagree, I don’t like him, I think he’s a lucky bullshitter, and I think this piece is a deliberate piss-take money maker.
I say this having sold my own work from the gift shop in Dismaland; he’s helped make me money and I still think he’s an asshat.
However, I’m not looking to argue, you’re free to like him. Different opinions on art make it more interesting. I find Banksy interesting, just not worth the fuss.
Hirst can go pickle himself though. 
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I’m sure Banksy has some sort of “shell” corporation set up to avoid that exact scenario.
My suspicion is that you’d get away with Banksy image theft as long as it wasn’t for a purely commercial/profit motive. If you were marketing say “Banksy” backpacks with an unaltered image on them, then you may get a letter from a lawyer representing a Banksy Art Unlimited or something like that. If I swiped a Banksy image, and say used it to make some sort of “statement”, I think he’d probably consider that fair game.
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And thus one has to question whether the “art” is the physical canvas that got shredded, or the “statement” being made, or the performance of the whole thing/“the event”…
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Fair point, and some of his work is about appropriation and reworking contemporary images so he’d kind of have to give you a pass to not come off as a hypocrite; he isn’t a massive rip-off artist like Richard Prince. At least Banksy makes stuff.
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A person could look at Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and proclaim it to be worthless garbage, while another could consider it a masterpiece and worth every penny of the $20,000,000 he/she paid for it.
Where’s the scam?
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Some of the stories coming out now are lending more credibility to this being a hoax (or at least a collaborative effort).
- Despite not being the most valuable piece of the day, it was the last lot of the auction (if it was auctioned earlier it would have hugely disrupted the rest of the proceedings)
- As others have mentioned, surely an auction house as prestigious as Sotheby’s would have fully inspected the work and noticed something wasn’t right (if nothing the else, the excess weight would have given it away)
- The auctioneer is strangely unfazed by the event
- It’s hanging off to the side and on the wall rather than displayed on a podium by the auctioneer
Still a cool stunt, though.
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It does look pretty strange.
Almost as if the winning bidder was committed to spending everything in his bank account… and did. 
A “collaborative effort” would answer @SamWinston question.
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It’s hard to create performance art that is impactful, popular, tangible and lasting. That it doubled the value of a previously existing $1M artwork is icing on top.
Well played!
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Yeah, you don’t have the battery sitting there for 12 years without someone replacing/recharging it. You don’t have someone buy and examine the work without noticing there’s a shredder in it. This was something that required a number of people to be in on it, including in the auction house. Sotheby’s has now gone from staid and stuffy auction house to millennial-cool (without any kind of rebranding effort that might alienate the existing, older clientele).
The value is reportedly estimated to have perhaps as much as doubled with this stunt. This is almost certainly the reason why it was done.
I don’t see how it could be anything else. It was quite successful at it, too.
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Take the whole frame and half-shredded art, put it in a larger frame/case, and put that up for auction.
You might even get more for it the second time around, if the bidders weren’t too cautious.
Now that’s an opinion we can all get behind!
ETA: Hopefully.
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Soytheby’s knew.
Banksy cleared wanted it to remain art (notice how the person was shred but not the focal point).
Wonderful statement and mature statement by an artist. A more noticed one might have burned it or destroyed it completely. This is probably a masterpiece.
the scam is that a lot of people in the art world make a lot of money by creating a ton of hype and publicity off of someone else’s work. kind of like
real estate agents making fat commissions by selling tiny condos for millions. some might liken both to leeches. For an encore perhaps Banksy could stage a fake death and separate a multitude of fools from tens of millions.
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This WAS the rebranding effort, and I’m fairly certain millennials could care less.
It takes a much better show to even get them to notice they aren’t so easy manipulated by something so blase. They were the ones not looking up from their phones, not the ones holding them up filming. 
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It’s brilliant. It doesn’t matter whether Soth. was in on it or not, it was no doubt Banksy’s idea.
Art hasn’t been aesthetically driven for decades. This is post-modern; meta/art about art, with also, art. Liking it is beside point.
