On October 5, 2018, seconds after Banksy’s Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby’s London for 1,042,000 pounds, a siren wailed and the canvas began sliding out of its frame in shredded strips, stopping halfway through. This episode goes beyond the shock of the moment to examine the mechanics hidden in the frame: a canvas given to a friend after the 2006 Barely Legal show, an 18-centimeter-deep housing that needed a power cord, and an auction house that accepted the eccentric packaging as part of the artist’s vision without ever looking inside.

We follow the aftermath, from the buyer agreeing six days later to keep the piece at full price and Pest Control renaming it Love Is in the Bin, to metal sculptor and magician Josh Gilbert’s analysis of Banksy’s own videos, which suggests the blades were sideways and nowhere near the canvas, and that the original may have simply rolled onto a hidden spool while a pre-cut decoy dropped out the bottom. The story ends back at Sotheby’s in October 2021, where the half-shredded work sold for 18,582,000 pounds.

• Why Sotheby’s never dismantled a seven-inch-thick frame with a power cord
• How a damaged painting became the first artwork created live during an auction
• The sideways-blade problem and the hidden-compartment illusion theory
• A permanent loan to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and a return to the auction block
• Whether the artist or the market won when a critique of wealth became a 25 million dollar asset