The article in The New York Times mentioned other hints that Sotheby’s perhaps knew that something was up. The frame was unusually thick and heavy, and the auction house would normally have carefully examined the piece prior to putting it up for sale. (I think they may even remove paintings from their frames to examine them in more detail.) The Times article pointed out that pictures are normally displayed on a podium while this was hanging on the wall. (Take a look at this article from The Daily Mail showing Edvard Munch’s The Scream at auction. The painting in its frame is held by the top and bottom. If they had done that in this case, the slot on the bottom would have been blocked.) Lastly, this was the last lot sold in the auction.
Also, there’s the mysterious stranger getting into an altercation with the guards. It fits the narrative a little too nicely, but doesn’t really make sense if you think about it.
Why would guards try to stop someone from leaving the room? I don’t think it’s illegal to leave an auction.
And why would this stranger act so conspicuously? If you were going to do something like this you’d have a small transmitter or cellphone or something similar in your pocket, push a button or dial a number, or whatever and then sit there quietly. Wearing black sunglasses and immediately leaving are exactly the wrong things to do.
With an artist’s frame, that is not going to happen - the frame is part of the work of art, removing one from the other would be destroying the artwork. Better have a good restorer at hand.
Not saying the theatre of it all isn’t suspect, though.
capacitor batteries will stay charged indefinitely and Lithium Ion batteries will stay charged for years. You’re thinking of traditional batteries which do fade sitting on the shelf.
Even if there was a legal recourse and Sotheby’s was 100% not in on it, I doubt they would take action against one of the world’s hottest artists. Plus you can’t buy publicity like this.
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Assuming that when the device was constructed there was no idea if or when the painting would be auctioned, wouldn’t a receiver have a to put a constant drain on the battery in order to listen for the triggering signal? Could a battery in that frame hold enough of a charge to power the receiver for 12 years?
Those aren’t rhetorical questions. I genuinely don’t know and I’m hoping that you or somebody here does.
And remember that you can’t use current battery technology; it has to be battery technology from 12 years ago.
Perhaps Banksy or one of his confederates was able to get close enough to the frame to turn on the receiver prior to the auction?
But I’m wondering about the shredder itself. I would have started with a commercially available one, but the picture looked wider than letter-size paper, and most shredders here in the US are sized for letter-sized paper. Your choices are even more limited if you’re looking for a commercially-available battery-powered shredder.
I would think that the receiver wouldn’t have to be very powerful. Could the receiver be powered by a camouflaged solar cell? A separate battery would then power the shredder and wouldn’t be drained until the proper signal was received and the shredder activated.
I confess my art ignorance. I don’t understand the 12 year gap between sale and acquisition by Sotheby. do they have a warehouse of stuff that they sit on until they think it’s elevated to paying art?
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Your theory seems to make sense. They buy something and then sit on it until they think they can sell it at a profit.
From what I understand, it’s actually quite common among the super-rich to buy art and just put it in storage. For example, there is supposedly tens of billions of dollars worth of art in storage in Geneva.
I needed to change the batteries in my college calculator after 15 years. They were the silver disks type. Those also do not corrode and leak when they get old.
This post is pure art.
Bows.
It stopped half way down. I thought that was a kind of art/marketing BS, making an only artistic statement while actually adding value.
But now I’ve also got the possibility that /the battery went flat while only half finished./ Which would be a lovely meta-meta statement- the art tried to destroy itself, but it failed because of it’s intrinsic limited lifetime…
From the video, it looks like a custom thing with what looked like scalpel or craft knife blades.
In the linked video in the OP, starting about 9 seconds in, there’s a still shot of the intact painting in a very different frame. So when was it moved to the shredder frame? Clearly & obviously a stunt that Sotheby’s was in on.
To paraphrase the great art critic Denis Leary “So, if some Houdini wants to destroy a couple swirls of paint… that are really only important to some very silly rich people… I don’t really give a damn.”
The art world is being played for chumps. but they want to be, so everyone is happy.
I even get to be happy - I’m laughing at them all. 
That’s not even his final form!
Magic Christian, he has seen it.