Believe it or not, this car door from a late 1990s Mazda Protege could be worth $200,000. Crazy, right? For that kind of money, you can get yourself a really cool supercar. But this isn’t any ordinary car door covered in graffiti. What you see here is a piece of highly collectible artwork from the 2013 installation Crazy Horse, which world-famous guerrilla artist Banksy created during his month-long residency in New York. The door is now up for grabs and has been listed in Julien’s Auction’s Street Art sale, with a starting bid of $25,000.
The Crazy Horse installation is considered one of the most political and innovative pieces created by Banksy. Executed through aerosol painting, the art originally included a seemingly abandoned Mazda sedan, a box truck, traffic cones, and carefully placed barrels. The stencil work presented a hard-hitting visual, depicting terrified men in gun sights and stampeding horses wearing night vision goggles.
The installation is inspired by and also named after the Apache helicopter with the call sign Crazy Horse 18, which, in 2007, took part in an airstrike in Iraq that tragically resulted in civilian fatalities. The street art also included a phone number that, when dialed, played audio clips from the incident.
While there’s no information on what happened to the full installation, the door from the Mazda survived and is up for auction for the second time since Banksy created the artwork. However, it remained unsold last time as the reserve wasn’t met. The door comes on a custom display stand and one of the traffic cones that were part of the original installation. It has a pre-sale estimate between $100,000 and $200,000, which sounds like a lot of money. However, it’s still quite affordable as compared to Banksy’s other artworks. The auction will take place in Beverly Hills on February 15, 2024, but bidding is already underway online.
Note – A Porsche 911 Turbo starts from $197,200.
