The Banksy painting offered at auction by Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus sold for £4.2 million at a London sale on Tuesday night.
Crude Oil (Vettriano) was the street artist’s remix of Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler, Britain’s most popular piece of art.
Mr Vettriano died on Saturday in the south of France.
The painting was created for a 2005 exhibition and added the effects of pollution to Vettriano’s idylic beach scene.
Mark Hoppus, along with his wife, Skye, bought the work in 2012 from a private collection.
Some of the money from the sale, which landed right in the middle of a £3 million to £5 million estimate range at Sotheby’s, will go to charities in Hoppus’s native California, including wildfire relief and cancer care. Mark Hoppus is a cancer survivor.
Mark Hoppus says he’ll spend on new visual artists with some of the money from his Banksy sale. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Crude OIl (Vettriano) is fully hand-painted by Banksy; an unusual distinction in his catalogue.
The Singing Butler was sold in 2004 for £744,800: a record for a Scottish painting. Vettriano’s work was extremely popular, especially in reproductions, but he wasn’t a critically acclaimed painter.
Apparently Banksy enjoyed this dichotomy. In 2017 Banksy’s work Girl With Balloon was voted Britain’s most popular art work.
Banksy’s works can fetch major sums at auction, though their creation in public spaces can cause issues with ownership and portability.
In 2005, Sunflowers from Petrol Station (another in the Crude Oils series) sold for £11.4 million. Game Changer, a piece Banksy created to honour NHS staff after the COVID-19 pandemic, realised £16.8 million in 2020.
Banksy’s most valuable work, Love is in the Bin, is a destroyed version of another work. At an auction of Girl with Balloon in 2018, a shredder in the just-sold picture activated and started to slice through the image that had just realised £1.3 million.
Banksy, who is probably from Bristol, intended to completely destroy the image, but the machine failed and instead created a new work, Love is in the Bin, that subsequently sold for £18.6 million in 2021.
As well as donating to charity, Mark Hoppus says that he and his wife intend to buy work by new, young artists with the cash from the sale.
