Shredded art worth more

Baden-Baden (Germany): The shredder that partially destroyed a Banksy canvas moments after it was sold at auction last year has been "disabled", a German museum said on Monday, ahead of the piece going on display. “We wanted to avoid having, in three or four days, a visitor who, just as in London hides a button and the shredding continues," said Henning Schaper, director of Frieder Burda museum in Baden-Baden.

The work, now called "Love is in the Bin", will be shown on Tuesday for the first time since it was created in a theatrical stunt at Sotheby's in London in October last year. "We opened the frame, we looked at everything and we saw to it that the mechanism (the shredder) had been disabled," said Schaper, without specifying who had done it.

The work, previously auctioned by Sotheby's as "Girl With Balloon", depicts an image that was originally spray painted by Banksy on London's Waterloo Bridge in 2002. The moment the auctioneer's gavel fell, a hidden mechanism inside the frame half shredded the artwork. Banksy then officially renamed it "Love is in the Bin."

Moments after the painting sold for USD 1.4 million (1.2 million Euros), a record for the maverick artist, it literally went through the shredder hidden in the frame.The then buyer and now owner, an anonymous European art collector, went through with the purchase anyway and some art experts said it was probably now worth more than it had been before the stunt. He has now loaned it to the Frieder Burda museum for a month. The Banksy artwork will be on display at the for four weeks, until March 3.