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The newspapers and internet are full of the incident of the shredding of Banksy's painting 'Girl with balloon'.

But (Quoting from BoredPanda):
People Were Amazed By Banksy’s Painting Shredding, But One Artist Noticed That Something Doesn’t Add Up

Josh Gilbert, an artist and blacksmith from Chicago, has some serious doubts about the shredding of the Banksy painting Girl with balloon (Youtube video) and suggests it is all a hoax:

His (three) arguments about the construction as shown in the Banksy video:

Those are pretty clearly x-acto blades attached to a piece of wood [...]. Presumably they are what is doing the actual "shredding". [...] but... they're mounted SIDEWAYS. You can see that there is no way these blades would cut canvas [...] mounted that way.

But you can see the blades are actually NOWHERE NEAR where the painting sits.

They're almost entirely towards the BACK of the painting. This would only really make sense if that was where the painting was going to come out [...] why would you put the blades there and have the painting come out of the front*

His conclusion:

When the wheel turns, the ACTUAL print is funneled back into the frame. It's safe. And simultaneously,a (halfway) pre shredded COPY is forced out of the bottom.

enter image description here He refers to this Youtube video by Knoptop, who actually made a miniature "Banksy Self-Destruct Shredding Artwork".

Was the Banksy picture in the frame shredded immediately after the auction?

* Personally, I find this argument the least convincing, because rollers can be used.

Community
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    How is this notable? All that video shows is that's possible to construct a fake to mimic the observed effect. – 410 gone Oct 11 '18 at 13:10
  • @EnergyNumbers He has actually studied [the Banksy video about the shredder](https://www.instagram.com/p/BomXijJhArX/?taken-by=banksy) and his observations are quite different from the [many other hoax shouters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAPBrwO8ua8) conjectures –  Oct 11 '18 at 13:16
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    If the **supposedly notable claim** is "The shredding is a hoax", the plain answer is "We have no way of telling". If the claim is "**Could** the shredding be a hoax?", the answer is "Yes, it could be". –  Oct 11 '18 at 13:33
  • @MichaelK Agreed, we currently don't know. I posted the question hoping something may show up in the days/weeks to come. There are too many people interested in the incident to have it die down quickly. –  Oct 11 '18 at 13:44
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    @JanDoggen Well in that case it will be all over the news. I seriously doubt that it is appropriate to post a question that one **knows** there is no answer to in the opes that there **might** be one later, but that is for the mods to decide. –  Oct 11 '18 at 13:47
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    Seems to me like the guy who claimed to have created the shredder frame could just be an impostor (and thus the contraption he was working on would also be fake). Without seeing the inside of the actual frame it's going to be impossible to know either way. – DaaaahWhoosh Oct 11 '18 at 19:35
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    The claim that Banksy shredded the painting is clearly notable. This question might be better if that were the notable claim. [related](https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1406/if-a-claim-is-commonly-accepted-does-questioning-it-require-a-notable-counter-c). – De Novo Oct 11 '18 at 19:42
  • It does seem unlikely... The painting would have had to have heavy batteries installed, a shredding mechanism and a slot for the shredded paper to come out of, which would surely have been noticed when the painting was carefully inspected before auction. A better question might be to examine the nature of the shredding mechanism and how it was kept secret. – dont_shog_me_bro Oct 12 '18 at 09:38
  • @dont_shog_me_bro: 20-30 grams per AA battery. Razors for the schredding plus mounting screws / nails, perhaps another 20 grams. Slit of 1/100 of an inch. All that in an ornamented wooden frame with no initial suspicion... I think the chances of that turning up on casual inspection is minimal. – DevSolar Oct 12 '18 at 10:47
  • @DevSolar I think your estsimates are optimistic. This was hand built, so e.g. the precision to get the paper through a 0.25mm slit as you suggest would be difficult to achieve. The paper itself would likely have warped a little since manufacture more than a decade earlier. And you would need quite a lot of AA batteries to provide enough energy to drive that motor too. I think it's more likely that they were able to tamper with it shortly before the auction. – dont_shog_me_bro Oct 12 '18 at 13:23
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    Looking over this question in its current form, the portion that seems most likely to be both relevant to the goal (determining whether this was fake) and potentially reasonable to evaluate is the claim that "the blades were mounted sideways". A question about that specifically (potentially as its own separate question) might be able to get more useful answers than the broader "was it shredded" claim. – Kamil Drakari Oct 12 '18 at 16:53
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    Adding fuel to the fire, [banksyfilm on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxkwRNIZgdY) has released a more detailed movie which includes photos - at the 8 second mark - showing a more realistic shredding mechanism than the Exacto blades. – Oddthinking Oct 18 '18 at 06:40
  • @Oddthinking Care to make that an answer? –  Oct 18 '18 at 07:30
  • @JanDoggen: But it is so opinion-based. *I* think it is more plausible, but I haven't explained the decoy blades and I haven't shown that the painting wasn't rolled up inside and a second painting shredded? (Also, I see no motive here. Why not just shred the first one and hide the second painting completely intact inside the frame? They are both equally valuable.) – Oddthinking Oct 18 '18 at 10:44
  • @dont_shog_me_bro [The batteries seem doable](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/402067/how-could-have-banksy-kept-an-rf-receiver-running-for-12-years) but the thread there mentions [that the frame may have been swapped](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdKdQWhlNTY) –  Oct 19 '18 at 15:15
  • Analyzing the 'Director's cut' video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dbYGefDdWo –  Oct 22 '18 at 18:54

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The Banksy 'Pest Control Agency' has now authenticated the shredded painting as a genuine piece of Banksy art, retitling it "Love is in the Bin". The buyer has reportedly accepted the shredding.

The buyer's identity was not revealed but Sotheby's quoted her as saying: "When the hammer came down last week and the work was shredded, I was at first shocked, but gradually I began to realize that I would end up with my own piece of art history."

The shredded work is likely to be as valuable as the unshredded work was, and barring some extremely complicated conspiracy which would provide doubtful benefits to anyone, we can probably assume the shredding really occurred.

Reference: CBC News.

On the other hand Banksy has already shown himself to be a prankster in the cause of art.

DJClayworth
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    [Pest Control is a service acting on behalf of Banksy](https://www.pestcontroloffice.com/whatispco.html), so if the question is "did Banksy fool everyone", you should consider that this isn't an independent verification. – De Novo Oct 12 '18 at 17:55
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    ...and, more to the point, it being an "authentic piece of Banksy art" doesn't in any way contradict the idea that the originally visible painting might have been preserved by the mechanism, while some other piece of Banksy art (pre-shredded or otherwise) was fed out the shredder feed. – Ben Barden Oct 12 '18 at 20:50
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    @BenBarden: Then we get into a deep philosophical mess: Even if part of the art was preserved, another part of the whole artwork *was* (pre-?)shredded, and that part is also a Banksy art piece, so presumably also valuable... – Oddthinking Oct 13 '18 at 02:04
  • Another circumstantial (hence just a comment) point in favour of it being real - in photos ([e.g. this from Sotherby's](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/45dbb9578e49c3951f4b47c1fa2ee2adbd4d0625/0_51_5568_3341/master/5568.jpg?width=940&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=2ac842e9cebbd259e597c7a0e8bc9ec0)) it looks like the 'shredding' didn't work especially well: many of the strips appear to be scored rather than cut all the way through. This makes more sense if it was real (non-optimal angles of the blades in Banksy's video) than fake (if he put in an already-shredded copy, why shred it badly?) – user56reinstatemonica8 Oct 13 '18 at 13:18
  • Nice piece to read: [How Banksy Authenticates His Work](https://reprage.com/post/how-banksy-authenticates-his-work) –  Apr 10 '19 at 11:08