Banksy's Love Is In The Bin Sales Sets A World Record

The anonymous artist's live demolition of his piece Girl with Balloon, which sold for £1 million in 2018, resulted in Love is in the Bin. It sold for £16 million at Sotheby's in London on Thursday, far exceeding its £4-6 million target price. With bids starting at £2.5 million, the price tag quickly climbed to £10 million as other proposals were made. As the competition tightened down between fewer bidders, bidding surged to a new high of £15 million.

Alex Branczik, head of Sotheby's Contemporary Art, described it as "the quintessential Banksy artwork and a true icon of recent art history." Will Gompertz, a former BBC arts editor, predicted that Love is in the Bin will become "one of the most significant artworks of the early twenty-first century" at the time. Since March 2019, the work has been on permanent loan to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany.