Less than one hour after it was verified to be a real installation, two guys were caught on camera stealing a piece of Banksy art from a south London street.
The artist posted on social media on Friday just after midday to affirm that the piece, which is a traffic stop sign covered in three planes that are said to resemble military drones, was his.
Social media users have posted a video of two guys in Peckham, at around 12:30 pm, removing a sign at the intersection of Southampton Way and Commercial Way.
As one of the men runs away after running the stop sign, witnesses can be heard saying “oh my god” and “it makes me so annoyed” in the background of the video.
It’s known that Banksy had nothing to do with the removal.
The validity of the artist’s work was confirmed when a number of images were posted to their Instagram feed without a description or explanation.
It can be challenging to sell a stolen Banksy because of the artist’s notoriety. For stealing and mishandling a Banksy painting honouring the victims of the 2015 assault on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, three men in their 30s were sentenced to prison in France last year.
Eight persons were arrested six months later in a different incident related to the theft of a mural by the elusive street artist from a wall outside of Kyiv, according to Ukrainian authorities.
Through the artist’s Pest Control Unit, which handles verification, Banksy will grant certificates of authenticity to artworks that are not judged to be stolen or inappropriately taken into private hands.
A Banksy sculpture that was stolen from him and turned up at Sotheby’s auction house in 2019 led the individual who took it from a plinth in central London to get in touch with the authorities.
The sale notes for The Drinker say the item was “mysteriously retrieved,” implying it was stolen by Banksy or his cronies. Sotherby’s said it was convinced the seller had the legal right to offer the piece for auction after speaking with the authorities.
The stop sign’s aircraft bore similarities to those seen in Banksy’s 2017 piece Civilian Drone Strike, which showed three drones destroying a crude picture of a house. Raising £205,000 for Reprieve and the Campaign Against Arms Trade, it was auctioned off at Art The Arms Fair.
Valentine’s Day Mascara, a 3.8-ton mural that debuted on the side of a Margate, Kent, home on Valentine’s Day, is one of the numerous installations that Banksy has installed this year.
The painting showed a housewife from the 1950s tossing a man into a chest freezer while wearing an apron and yellow washing gloves. She also had a bulging eye and a missing tooth.
It was exhibited in September in the free-to-view lobby of the Art of Banksy show on Regent Street in central London.
