A member of staff poses in front of a work of art by Banksy entitled 'Show Me The Monet" at Sotheby's auction house in London, Friday, Oct. 16, 2020. Banksy’s “Show Me the Monet” playful take on a famous Impressionist painting has sold to an unidentified bidder at auction on Wednesday evening Oct. 21, 2020, for 7.6 million pounds (US dollars 9.8 million). (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Banksy’s playful take on a famous Impressionist painting has sold at auction for 7.6 million pounds ($9.8 million), the second-highest price ever paid for a work by the British street artist.
“Show Me the Monet” sold to an unidentified bidder at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday evening, surpassing its upper pre-sale estimate of 5 million pounds.
In the 2005 work, Banksy added abandoned shopping carts and an orange traffic cone to Claude Monet’s image of water lilies in his garden at Giverny.
Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art, said the work was one of the “strongest and most iconic” Banksy works to appear at auction.
Banksy, whose real name has never been officially confirmed, began his career spray-painting buildings in Bristol, England, and has become one of the world’s best-known artists.
Another Banksy work, “Devolved Parliament,” sold last year at Sotheby’s in London for 9.9 million pounds. Earlier this month, his graffiti-style piece “Forgive Us Our Trespassing” sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.
Sinéad O’Connor, the gifted Irish singer-songwriter who became a superstar in her mid-20s but was known as much for her private struggles and provocative actions as for her fierce and expressive music, has died at 56.
Kevin Spacey was acquitted of sexual assault on Wednesday after the Oscar winner’s star turn as a witness in his own defense spared him a possible prison term and gave him a shot at a career comeback.
A California appeals court on Wednesday will consider reviving the dismissed lawsuits of two men who allege Michael Jackson sexually abused them as children for years, a move the court appears likely to make after a tentative decision that would order the cases back to a lower court for trial.
