Urban Art Association

you will never be able to stop it. ever.

and it does help people with the money actually get hold of one.

banksy print arn't the only flipped thing. everything on ebay is, but it goes well beyond prints.

As artce says you cannot avoid flippers, so you might as well embrace them.

The Xmas Banksy release tends to be for charity. Therefore POWs goal should be to raise as much cash as possible for the chosen cause whilst trying to level the playing field for fans against flippers.

The best way of doing this is a paid lottery. £10 per ticket. You can buy as many tickets as you like under what ever name/email address/IP address as you like. The tickets are sold over a 7 day period.

Most flippers will buy a few tickets, but after buying 20 maybe they would lose their nerve. If they buy this amount, then I assume the rest of us would buy a couple, therefore the flippers have 10 times more tickets than me but that is not that significant if there are 20000 tickets sold. The flipper donates £200 to the charity.

If they buy less, then I get a better chance - result
If they buy more, then they are being forced to give more to charity - result

A free lottery makes no sense as it is easy to get multiple email addresses / ID etc so they will always swap these.

Queuing, whilst fun really is a failed model. If you give too long a head start, the flippers will employ people to sit in the queue. If you do it at a moments notice, then it is only open to the few that live next door to the event.

The only other way is the crash the market like what happened with micallef by releasing very large numbers of cheap prints - but I doubt POW are up for this.

Yep that looks like the best way around it. Let the money go to charity rather than in the hands of flipper.

I was thinking aswell that if POW charged a lot of money to purchase a COA in the first six months of buying a print at source it may keep the flippers away also. It would mean that if someone did have to sell the print within 6 months it would be POW getting the profit.

Obviously the hype helps (although he clearly is not lacking for hype), but he doesn't make any more money if someone else sells it for 10 times what they paid him and POW for it.

Fuck me you've all whined about this for the past 4 years, get over it.

the entry name already needs to match the credit card for lottery payment, not sure what else they can do really

I don't think any artist wants to sell work to people that will go down in value So its best to sell at under value, but the side effect of that is people can then resell for a profit, and that then starts a chain reaction with demand rising, values rising
A way to stop it would be to price at their current market value, but I think in Banksy's case he would need to over price them to gain control of the situation.

But of course I don't think Banksy would really want to fiddle too much with the resale market, as at the end of the day its all good PR for people to see his work selling for continually higher amounts.

I like the idea of a delayed COA.

A timed edition would raise a boatload of cash, and would still result in prices increasing on the aftermarket. There would be a lot less unhappy folks with a timed edition though, as nobody who truly cared would be shut out.

Seems to me the only people who are against this are the ones who want to make a quick buck.

I think this is the key. It is in the best interest of the artists to have people driving prices up, having demand far greater than supply. Look at all the posts here, this is great hype and free publicity and issuing a new colour for a few who missed on the q makes POW and B look even better. Yet it is such a small thing compared to all that wanted but didn't get one. So it doesn't hurt resale prices and that is important for B and POW.

I think it all worked out very well for B and POW and those who were lucky enough to get one. I wasn't so luck but that is life. Not the end of the world. I'll likely get one down the road when some of the hype wears off.

we were having this arguement 4 years ago. without the flippers this forum and indeed the whole 'street art scene' would have died a long time ago. Well done POW...still laughing all the way to the bank.

Flipping is the natural result of profit potential. So any solution needs to change the profit potential.

Ashby is spot on with a for charity lottery, which worked decently for VLH. I do disagree with the inherent fairness being able to buy unlimited tickets. This unduly benefits the rich, even though you may be capping it to 1 per person.

Here are the elements that reduce flipping:

1) Adding a front end cost to the lottery.

I favor £5 tickets, and capping the amount each person can buy at 5 tickets = £25 Any other way, you're bound to have someone spending more than they can afford and coming up empty.

Just by putting a cost into trying to get the Banksy print, you'd probably reduce entries by 75%. Plus the credit card transaction provides a degree of transparency.

Finally, use the lottery ticket to verify IDs, by insisting the name on the card used to purchase the print matches the name of the card used to purchase the lottery ticket.

2) Providing a powerful disincentive to flipping by making all Banksy buyers agree to a contract

The basic terms of the contract:

a) No change of ownership or resale during the first six months.

b) Agree to pay an additional 20% artist resale rights (which can go to charity) on all "flips" of the print during the initial two years.

c) Failure to abide by the policies, results in the work being deemed "unauthorized" and therefore prohibited from Ebay.

Just having the contract in effect enables Pest Control to shut down any Ebay auction. Pest Control could go a step further and actually purchase a print, have it shipped, then have Ebay refund the money by showing that edition number violated the contract in place.

Have a few flippers wind up £450 shorter with nothing to show for it, and the word would spread like wildfire, don't even think of going for a quick flip.

3) Reduce aftermarket prices of prints by increasing supply.

Banksy needs to reduce the secondary market price of his future prints by increasing the overall supply. He needs to release far more often, or with much larger sized editions.

I would say he needs to be releasing at least 2,000 prints a year.

If I had to say the perfect release schedule is 5 prints a year: 2 at an ed of 500, 2 at an edition of 250, and 1 at an edition of 1,000.

I think they should put them all on ebay. Money can still all go to charity (at least Banksys cut of it). POW would make more, thats for sure. It would let the market dictate the price, while generating a lot of money for a good cause. I see many Charities using ebay for auctions.

Don't allow anyone from this forum to purchase prints from pow.