Urban Art Association

Banksy: primed and all set for take-off, by sakyamuni on Apr 9, 2012 9:40:36 GMT 1, Article in the telegraph:


www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/artsales/9181766/Banksy-primed-and-all-set-for-take-off.html

Banksy: primed and all set for take-off
Is the art market witnessing a Banksy revival? Colin Gleadell investigates.

After a few years in the wilderness, the elusive graffiti artist Banksy was back on form last week with two highly successful auction sales. At Christie’s, a metal panel from the exterior of a sound-system lorry which Banksy had spray-painted with military helicopter images for the 1998 Glastonbury festival, trebled estimates to sell for £103,250.
It had been an image that impressed Damon Albarn, the frontman for Blur, who were performing at the festival, leading to a commission to design the cover for the band’s Think Tank album. But more importantly, it was a rare outdoor work for which Banksy had given permission to be sold. Four years ago, Banksy stopped the trade in his outdoor work because, he said, it was never meant to be sold, so this was an exception.
The next day, Arsenal striker Theo Walcott was among the young, cosmopolitan crowd at Bonhams’ urban art sale, where 18 of 19 works by Banksy were sold, mostly above estimates, for over £400,000. The biggest spender was a buyer from Canada who had flown in just for the sale. One of many new clients to Bonhams on the day, he bought several works including the top lot, Banksy’s Love is in the Air, a stencilled painting of a rioter throwing a bunch of flowers, for an above-estimate £87,650.
These sales come after a period, since late 2008, in which the Banksy market has been looking shaky, but should also be seen in the context of the preceding three years in which Banksy’s work had followed a dizzying upward spiral. The phenomenon took off after it became known that Damien Hirst was a Banksy collector, along with Christina Aguilera and Angelina Jolie.
To street cred was added a certain financial whizz-kid know-how as city traders got into the action, followed by major art-dealing concerns such as the Mugrabi and Nahmad families. From a tentative start in 2005, when five works by Banksy were offered at auction and three sold for a maximum £7,200, 10 pieces appeared the following year, and 124 the next. The record for his unique paintings and sculptures rose from £62,400 in 2006, to £323,000 in 2007, and then $1.9 million (£950,300) in 2008, when the number of works at auction totalled 340.
Often overlooked in the press reports was the meteoric rise of Banksy’s more affordable screen prints, printed in large editions. Take two examples in last week’s sales. Bomb Love, a girl hugging a rocket bomb from an edition of 150, sold at Bonhams in 2005 for £200. By 2008, another print from the edition had fetched £14,000. Pulp Fiction, two mafia types wielding bananas instead of guns, was produced in 2004 and priced at £150. By early 2008, an example had sold at auction for £14,400.
Then, following the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, the contemporary art market took a hit, from which Banksy was not excluded. During the autumn of 2008, all the UK salerooms, from Bloomsbury’s to Bonhams and Sotheby’s, recorded high unsold rates for Banksy works. Confidence in the print market was not helped by a high-profile court case highlighting Banksy fakes sold on eBay.
Over the next year, consignments of Banksy works to auction fell by nearly 70 per cent, and major works such as a set of six Kate Moss prints went unsold. As a result, estimated values for Banksy came down. Although the ratio of sold to unsold works improved during 2010 and 2011, several examples were seen to have lost value. A sculpture of David, after Michelangelo, for example, which sold for £204,400 in 2007, sold last October for just £97,250.
So are we witnessing a Banksy revival? Alan Montgomery of Bonhams believes the Banksy market is “back with a vengeance. The market is much more international than it was before.” Apart from America and Britain, bidding last week came from Japan, Italy, France, Canada and Taiwan. Some later Banksy prints reached record auction levels. Morons, the 2007 print of an auction scene in which Banksy lampoons his buyers as idiots, sold for £8,125.
But it was the earlier works which investors were watching most intensely. Bomb Love had been caught in the downturn, frequently going unsold with aggressive estimates up to £7,000. Last week, with a more reasonable £4,000 estimate, an example sold for £10,250.
Similarly, a Pulp Fiction print sold for £10,600, edging closer to those peak levels.
Kate Moss, though, is still to find her feet. Banksy’s print, after Warhol, had sold for over £60,000 in 2008, but last week was unsold with a £30,000 estimate. This revival is still feeling its way.