Banksy’s iconic Girl With Balloon (2006) attracted feverish bidding in the room and on the phones, racing past its high estimate of £300,000 to hammer at £860,000, or just over £1 million ($1.3 million with fees). As the gavel slammed, a siren rang out through the salesroom and everyone stood stunned as the Banksy canvas slid through the frame that it was contained in and emerged underneath—but shredded.

It seems that the art world’s biggest prankster concocted a scheme in which his work would get destroyed as soon as it was sold.

“We have not experienced a work spontaneously shredding after it sells for a million pounds,” Sotheby’s Europe head of Contemporary Art, Alex Branczik said at the press conference. (1)

At the end, all art will be destroyed.

At the end, we will seize from being.

At the end, even the cosmos itself will not be.

And yet, what we do will echo in eternity.

Not because we are eternal.

But especially because we are not.

Yes, art is immortal within the passage of the aeons.

But only because it is ephemeral…