YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Branczik

lines on the record
13
first
2025-07-22
most recent
2025-07-22
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “About Sothebees is when you have an auction, when you have something great, it gets the full weight of the entire business behind it. And that's where we see our best results In that time, I think Banksy has gone from being a sort of collected by street art collectors to being in the great collections alongside some of the great artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. This is done something to help the perception of him as an artist. I think it'll be one of those moments that goes down in Sotheby's history. We've sold so many important and great artworks over time. And for it to happen at Southey's, for it to be created at Southey's is something truly unique.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “But in the end, it sold for nineteen. You know, the power of an auction really can't be underestimated. There is no way we would have been able to achieve this price through a private sale. And I think when you've got something truly unique, truly exceptional, and in a market with a rising tide, there is nothing better than auction for achieving the highest price. It takes confidence in the team and trust in the expertise. That trust goes beyond just the specialist. I said, you know, I do think the press team were so instrumental. We can advertise, we can pay to market things. We can ship things around the world, but really it's the press, especially with something like this. which has that sort of capacity to go viral and getting that correct and getting that messaging correct is so important in so much of what we do understand the right angles for the media going to the right publications i think that can't be underestimated it's the best thing”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “She just said banksy at that moment, I suddenly realized who this woman was because I'd never met her throughout this whole process. You know, it was actually a wonderful moment because this thing had both sort of, we didn't choose our roles in this, right? She was bidding on a painting and I was just doing my job. You know, I had told her at the time that I did believe that this is worth more for what's happened. But prices went so high very, very quickly. And she came with the idea to sell. It was exactly three years later in the same cell room. We did have to fight for it. It was competitive with other auction houses. But it would have been impossible for any other auction house to do it justice. It was in a four to six million pounds, so four times what it had sold for previously. We timed it absolutely at the top of the market, and it is still today the record price for the artists and saw deep, deep bidding. We expected a price in excess of 10 million pounds.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Say it was just a joke, and I'm sorry. I needed to afford the buyer some time. I think it took her almost a week to make the decision. The buyer agreed to the sale. We put it back on view on street. And in the pouring rain, we had people queuing around the block to see it. We had people flying in just to see this thing. And it just become such an incredible overnight phenomenon. I think it was a year later or two years later, and I was at a party at Iva Bracker's house during Fries and this very elegant lady, stuck at our finger and literally poked me.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “The work that is then available to take home is something completely different. Now you could compare it to something being damaged and in which case, yes, the buyer wouldn't need to continue with the purchase. But in this case, it was bought by a very private European collector who just really loved the image and had wanted a girl with balloon. And what was available to her, having just bid the record price for the artist, was a half shredded painting. To begin with, you know, gave him the opportunity to decide whether they wanted to continue with the purchase. On the other side, we had a consigner who technically we owe £850,000 to. So if the purchase doesn't happen, there's a certain amount of pressure on there to make sure that it does go through. And whether the consigner, who was Banksy's press agent at the time, would actually expect to be paid or whether they would sort of graciously walk away.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Is an auction business. We are governed by laws and by compliance. It was a challenge because we sell something as it is listed in the catalogue, as it is described in the catalogue. This was a painting called Girl with Balloon.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Intended, there was no wrongdoing. You know, we're not the only famous institutions have been pranked by Banksy. He's managed to secrete paintings into the Met, MoMA, to the British Museum, to Tate. And this is other beasts. And he's done it and queued us. You know, it was an off-the-cuff comment that I made when we came off the rostrum to the press. And I said, we've been bank seed. And I think we handled it very successfully because, you know, we turned it into an artwork that was created at Sotheby's piece of performance art. And I think probably wound up Banksy in the process because sort of sewed it up all up a little bit too neatly.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Without any exaggeration, my inbox was literally hundreds of journalists from different publications and were calling me off the hook. It was very clear to me at that moment that this had gone completely viral. Our then CEO, he called me and he made me swear that I didn't know and that none of my team knew that this was about to happen. And that was very easy for me to do. It made no sense for Bangsi, who is far too sophisticated and had far too much integrity in what he does to actually collude. It would completely diminish the impact of what he was doing. So it obviously made no sense for us to be involved despite everybody wanting it to be the case. And I was always guided by the strong conviction that there was no harm.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “You can see me. I'm laughing. I'm talking the telephone to one of the bidders and explaining what's going on. I was very quick to understand what it was and to take it in the spirit in which I think it was intended. You know, straight after the auction, as we always do, there's a press conference. And we have an amazing press team. Lots of the press were asking questions about whether it would be a binding sale. And I sort of put my hands up and said, you'll have to forgive me. This is the first time this has ever happened. We need a bit of homework and we'll come back to you. But the period after the sale was genuinely one of the most frantic of my career at Sotherby's. The sale was on a Friday night. And I remember this. I woke up the next morning. I was supposed to be on the rostrum for the day sale the next day. And I looked at my phone.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Telephones and good competition. And so we knew that it was going to sell. So, the lot before had been the cause, which sold very, very well. And I actually, for some reason, I think I had two telephones. And I was bidding with somebody on the bank seat. And in the end it sold, I think the last two bidders, we had two representatives from our German offices bidding against each other on telephones. And the hammer came down and it sold well, £800,000 hammer against an estimate of £200,000. An alarm went off. That was the most noticeable thing, an audible sign that something's up. I realized immediately what had happened because suddenly in that moment all these slightly odd individual things that had occurred throughout the consignment process suddenly made sense. And I was like,”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Banksy's press officer at the time. The only request was that it was in the evening sale and that it should be on view during the auction. Usually banks you wouldn't want works that he'd gifted being sold but in this case he had given it his blessing. You know when I look back at it why his team were able to do what they do is because they knew how we worked so well. They knew our motivations and because every bank seat that we've ever sold, we've had to run through pest control, his organization they knew our touchpoints, they knew how we work, they knew our deadlines, they knew how to get around them. And he did so brilliantly. It was a big night. So it was our October evening sale in 2018 and it had good interest from the start because it came in with a very attractive estimate, 200 to 300,000 pounds. It's a very popular image, so it was, we knew from the beginning that this would sell very well. And sure enough, on the day of the sale, we had a number of...”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Time we stole Banksy at Sotherwee's was in our Olympia sale room in probably 2003, 2004. He is a street artist from Bristol originally, but I think over the course of certainly coinciding with my time at Sotherby's the last 20 years, he's gone from being a street artist collected by street art collectors to being one of the most sought after contemporary artists held an amazing collections alongside everything from Picasso, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and so on. Whether he likes it or not, he has become one of the great, one of the elites of the art market, and that's a far cry from his early days tagging walls in Bristol. So the original artwork was entitled Go with Balloon, which is a standard image for Banksy. And I remember it because at the time no Banksy had made anywhere close to a million pounds. It was consigned by...”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Often Seleby's plays a part in the provenance of an important artwork. I think over the decades we've sold artworks, collections which become legendary in their own right. But I think in this case the artwork itself was created at Sony's. I think it's a very unique situation in which the auction house participated in the creation of the artwork. Southern's didn't choose to do this, Sotheby's was chosen.”

    2025-07-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Specialist | The Untold Story of the Shredded Banksy, with Alex Branczik · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT