Urban Art Association

Financial Times article about Urban Art / Banksy, by cyberkid on Sept 26, 2017 10:59:36 GMT 1,

FT article

September 22, 2017

by Melanie Gerlis

Just ahead of last week’s opening of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first major UK exhibition, street artist Banksy made his mark. The anonymous artist confirmed via Instagram that he was the creator of two murals now on the walls of the Barbican Centre in London that reference the American artist’s street background. On his social media feed, Banksy wrote: “Major new Basquiat show opens at the Barbican — a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls.”

Such is the complicated relationship between street art and the polished platforms of the art world.

Street art, sometimes described within the broader category of Urban art, is still in its infancy on the market — Banksy is something of an outlier — but it has certainly proved popular over the past 10 years. In the UK, works by Banksy and forlorn figures by Stik are national darlings. Banksy topped a recent Samsung-organised poll of 20 shortlisted British art works in which Stik’s “A couple hold hands in the street” came out above a Henry Moore. People of all ages and demographics are attracted to street art, from schoolchildren to Hollywood’s glitterati, though the art world elite is still wavering.

Not so at Moniker, a fair dedicated to street art, which opens its eighth edition in London next month with three times more floor space (3,000 sq. ft) for its 29 exhibitors and seven installations. The fair’s first New York edition opens in May 2018.

“Street art has come a long way from its vandalism roots,” says Tina Ziegler, director of the fair since last year. “It’s now a digestible, illustrative, welcoming form of art for a generation that is politically switched-on, obsessed with its current culture and looking for a voice.”


There have been problems, as the legalities of owning art with its roots in rebellion have been truly tested. Until relatively recently, street pieces carved out of walls were offered fairly openly on the market. During the previous Folkestone Triennial in 2014, Banksy graced the town’s walls with “Art Buff”, a woman with clunky headphones looking at an empty plinth. Before the festival ended, the building’s tenants removed the work and shipped it to the United States for sale, with a reported £500,000 price tag. Creative Foundation, a local arts charity, mounted a legal challenge, which it eventually won, because the tenants were not the wall’s rightful owners. Banksy, whose persona relies on his anonymity, “didn’t want to get involved” according to Tim Maxwell, a partner at law firm Boodle Hatfield, who acted for the charity.

Alistair Upton, chief executive of Creative Foundation, now the official owner of “Art Buff”, is delighted to have the work back but is still working out how best to display it again in Folkestone. “One ton of wall is not the easiest thing to own,” he says. Last week he hosted a panel at this year’s festival titled “A Banksy in your town; a blessing or a curse?”

Major auction houses and dealers no longer sell pieces taken from the wall. That doesn’t mean people won’t still try to trade them, but legal and ethical question marks should at least limit this market. Business is now in studio works made by artists who generally have a street presence and who share an aesthetic of rebellion, relevance, simplicity and occasional humour.

Social media has been a game changer. “You could say Instagram made this market,” Ziegler says. Street pieces that may previously have been removed or attracted only a local audience are now beamed across the world in seconds, proving an unparalleled marketing campaign for artists who are generally self-taught and unrepresented. “It’s a way of making work immortal,” says Ralph Taylor, global head of postwar and contemporary art at Bonhams and previously a director at street art specialists Lazarides Gallery.

Price points also help: at Moniker, a limited-edition print release by up-and-coming Los Angeles mural artist Audrey Kawasaki starts at around £100 (Thinkspace gallery). Ziegler believes “a good 90 per cent of these works will go up in value in the next five years.”

There can be other issues, even for works not on walls, including fakes and forgeries: simple designs are not difficult to replicate. Stik recently had to stop the sale of 700 eggs printed with one of his images without his authority. Banksy now issues certificates of authenticity through Pest Control, established in 2008. “No one will touch a [Banksy] work without a certificate,” Taylor says.

Quality control is also tricky in a field that is young and open to all. “Not many works pass muster,” Taylor says. Ziegler is more upbeat about the crop of talent and highlights the skill of artists who can spray paint on to large walls. “It’s a very difficult medium to control,” she says. The appeal of street art, she says, is “about matching that technical skill with relevant conversation”.

A special section at Moniker next month, called “Transient Tales”, traces urban art’s roots back to the 1920s. “In the [American] Depression, young men left their towns to see the country, to become free. They drew symbols on trains to communicate with each other, and these were the original ‘monikers’,” Ziegler explains.

It seems a far cry from today’s conservative and business-like market — part of the point that Banksy is making at Barbican — yet a taste for edgier, outsider art is creeping in. Hot-ticket contemporary artists such as JR and Sterling Ruby are relentlessly urban. (JR, who has just pasted a huge photo of a young boy on the US-Mexico border, started out as a graffiti artist in Paris.)

Then of course there is Basquiat, who came to the art world’s attention through his graffiti collective SAMO© at the end of the 1970s. Not only does Basquiat now have a major museum show in London, in May his 1982 “Untitled” sold for a record $98m ($110.5m with fees), and so he overtook Andy Warhol as the priciest American artist to sell at auction. Perhaps the previous canon is shifting in line with a new taste. “If one dead, drug-using, black man comes into the pantheon, it could begin to confer legitimacy elsewhere,” Taylor says.

by The Financial Times