The four-tonne, 6ft brick wall came with a mural by one of the world’s most famous artists, a New York-style graffiti battle and a heartwarming backstory.
But when Banksy’s Battle to Survive a Broken Heart went up for auction in New York on Wednesday night with a high pre-sale estimate of $3 million, it did not elicit a single bid.
Experts said the failure underscored the tepid demand in the high-end art market amid broader economic uncertainty. Plus, there was the size and weight of the artwork and the lack of Banksy’s own seal of approval.
Only a few years ago, billionaire trophy-hunters and collectors flush with disposable cash pushed the art market to record highs, and authenticated Banksy pieces sold well above their pre-sale estimates.
The mural was displayed at a Downtown shopping mall
SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
In 2021, Love is in the Bin broke Banksy’s record sale price when it sold at auction for $25 million (£18.6 million) at Sotheby’s in London.
The artwork, originally named Girl with Balloon, became infamous after it was partially destroyed by a built-in shredder when it was sold at auction for the first time in 2018.
The half-shredded Banksy “Love is in the Bin”, 2018
BEN STANSALL/AFP
“In 2020 and 2021 you saw a lot of auction records, particularly for Banksy and his signed works and canvases,” said Jasper Tordoff, a Banksy specialist with the London trading platform My Art Broker. “An awful lot of these were selling well above the high estimates. Since then, we’ve seen a considerable pullback.”
In the broader market, high-end sales have slumped, works by leading artists have been pulled at the last minute and in New York there has been a wave of gallery closures and layoffs.
During the spring auction season this month, New York’s three big houses — Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips — sold a combined $838 million worth of art excluding buyer’s premiums, well short of their estimates for $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion.
Among the high-profile casualties were Tall Thin Head, a sculpture by the Swiss-Italian artist Alberto Giacometti, which was passed in without a single bid as collectors were spooked by the $70 million asking price.
Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair was pulled mid-sale on May 12 after its asking price was set at $30 million.
Alberto Giacometti’s Tall Thin Head
JOHN ANGELILLO/ALAMY
Andy Warhol’s Big Electric Chair
KYLIE COOPER/REUTERS
Banksy, the famously elusive guerrilla artist, painted Battle to Survive a Broken Heart on the side of a Brooklyn warehouse in 2013 after a chance encounter with its owner, Vassilios Georgiadis.
Georgiadis was standing outside smoking a cigarette when he noticed a dark van parked down the block. He told the driver that it was in danger of being struck by trucks turning at the intersection and for him to pull into his driveway.
The driver, who wore sunglasses and a wide-brimmed fisherman’s hat, and spoke in a distinctive English accent, took up his offer while he went to a convenience store for cigarettes and coffee. He returned that evening to spray-paint a heart-shaped balloon covered with Band-Aids on a brick wall of the nondescript building.
The mural, painted during a month-long Banksy residency in New York, quickly drew large crowds. It also caught the attention of taggers, with one brazenly spray-painting the words “Omar NYC” in red beside the balloon.
The graffiti battle intensified when a tagger scrawled “Shane” in purple spray paint. Sensing they had a valuable work of art on their hands, Georgiadis’s family hired security guards to protect the site round-the-clock.
The following evening, a third tag appeared. Someone, believed to be Banksy, had clandestinely stencilled “is a little girl” in white and pink beside the prior tags along with the words “I remember MY first tag” in black. Banksy’s crown-like signature also appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of the wall.
Georgiadis died of a heart attack in 2021 aged 67, and his family decided to sell Battle to Survive a Broken Heart and donate a percentage of the proceedings to the American Heart Association. It was wheeled out of its climate-controlled warehouse a month ago, and tens of thousands came to view it on display at the Winter Garden mall in downtown New York.
It went under the hammer at the shopping centre on Wednesday with a pre-sale estimate of between $1 million and $3 million. The bidding began at $500,000 and quickly fell to $300,000 — then $250,000.
“It’s worth many, many times that,” Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey’s auction house in New York, assured wary bidders. “If it won’t fit in your home, donate it to a museum for an enormous tax write-off,” he pleaded, before calling a halt to the auction. He told The Times afterwards: “Something like this object is so unpredictable.”
The failure to attract a bid underlined the caution being exercised at auction by wealthy art collectors amid broader economic uncertainty. Another factor weighing against the sale of the mural was the lack of the artist’s certificate of authenticity.
Banksy established a “pest control office” in 2009 to authenticate genuine pieces and prevent fakes from circulating in the secondary art market. But he endorses only artworks that were produced for commercial sale, and rarely gives his stamp of approval to street art.
“For our collectors, they really wouldn’t have considered this just because the reselling opportunities are quite slender,” Tordoff said.
Georgiadis’s son Anastasios said that while he was disappointed the artwork had failed to sell, he felt his father was not ready to let it go. “It’s really the last piece of him that we have,” Anastasios, 37, said. “We wanted to see it go to somebody who would appreciate and take care of it while raising money and awareness for a very important cause.”
Ettinger said he was speaking to several interested parties and hoped to sell the piece in the coming days — or failing that, at a gala for the heart association in June. “It was disappointing last night,” he said. “But I think it will have a happy ending.”
