any hutch?

Well i'd go for the Neate (apprentice) but I dont like it so wont:-)

I might go for lot 53 neate, he looks like how i feel on a Friday

And will keep an eye on the tart collage

Looking at it again, theres only a few lots all told. I do wonder if any 'money' is going to bother going

I'd love a Kate. Anybody want to sell one?

I have a a signed HMW so I interested in the one in the sale and how much it goes for. I noticed that on the image there is a ghost image in reverse upside down. Almost as if they got the paper the wrong way up when they did the first black covering. Can anyone else see it or is it my PC?

i really like the dan baldwin canvasses, but 15-20k estimate puts me short by about 15-20k.

how come the radar rat is unsigned? wasnt the edition of 75 all signed? i thought the unsigned edition was unavailable anyone got any info on this?

Even Banksy slammer??? Lend us a quid!

ANY ONE GOING TUESDAY EVENING ??

I'm going tomorrow for champers

The Radar Rat was only a Signed edition

www.ft.com/cms/s/775083da-d053-11dc-9309-0000779fd2ac.html

Banksy moves streets ahead

By Antony Thorncroft
Published: February 2 2008 00:49

Banksy – which might or might not be the street name of Robert Banks, who is (possibly) a 33-year-old former butcher from (certainly) Bristol – was the artistic phenomenon of 2007. After years of dodging the authorities and teasing the media, this elusive creator of witty and imaginative graffiti found monetary success thrust upon him by the auction houses. Last October “The Rude Lord”, one of a series of oils in which Banksy defaces an Old Master, sold for a record £322,900 at Sotheby’s in London.

In the possibly hyperbolic words of Sotheby’s specialist Ralph Taylor: “He is the quickest growing artist anyone has ever seen of all time.” Since Banksy refuses interviews, it is impossible to know whether the UK’s most celebrated anarchist has been corrupted by this fortune. He maintains that he still gives away much of his art through the internet, but he now has a dealer, Steve Lazarides, operating from a Soho gallery; holds exhibitions in Los Angeles; and is the artist of choice for celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Jude Law and Christina Aguilera.

The Banksy phenomenon neatly mirrors the search for novelty that has pushed demand for contemporary art to stratospheric heights, despite his curating problems. Much of his work is site specific, and the successful bidder who paid £208,000 on eBay earlier this month for a Banksy graffiti of a Victorian artist also acquired the Notting Hill wall that it decorates.

But an art movement cannot be built around one artist, and on February 5 Bonhams will raise the stakes by holding its first sale devoted to urban art, a category devised to acknowledge the fact that many of the leading creators of street art have now moved into the comfort of studios, and that Banksy has forerunners as well as followers.

With 22 works, Banksy is well represented in the auction. “Laugh Now”, designed as a backdrop to the bar in a Brighton club and depicting a line of stencilled monkeys stretching across six metres, carries a £200,000 estimate, but could easily set a new record for the artist.

There should also be interest in one of his most famous images, the acrylic “Bomb Love”, depicting a young girl hugging a bomb, with a £40,000 estimate, and in “Kate Moss”, a screenprint in which Banksy updates the celebrated Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which should make £30,000.

Another intriguing lot is the CD case of an album by socialite Paris Hilton. Banksy slipped into record stores and tampered with 500 of the albums, remixing some of the tracks and adding his own commercial messages, such as “every CD you buy puts me further out of your league”. Most of the CDs were withdrawn but this one escaped and carries a £600 estimate.

Where Banksy led, other artists followed, notably Paul Insect (again, a pseudonym seems likely) whose first show last year was scooped up in its entirety by Damien Hirst. Insect’s “Elvis”, with an £8,000 estimate, depicts Presley metamorphosing into a skeleton.

Also attracting interest is Adam Neate, a teenager, who began by leaving his paintings on wood in the street. Now with a dealer and a sell-out first show, he has a £30,000 top estimate on “The Apprentice”, an unsettling Baconesque image.

Then, on February 28, Sotheby’s will hold a sale of contemporary art with five Banksys, including his “Happy Copper” and “Mona Lisa”. The top lot is “Simple intelligence test” which, again, features monkeys; it sold at Banksy’s first show in Bristol in 2000 for about £1,000 and now carries a top estimate of £150,000.

One attraction of Banksy to the auction houses is that his art is admired by a generation that has never before entered a saleroom. They come to view the Banksys and might well be diverted by other lots, such as work by Faile, a New York collective numbering two, sometimes three, artists, whose American comic book imagery is fetching ever higher prices. Sotheby’s includes two examples on February 28.

So far, Banksy’s appeal has yet to widen out from celebrity Hollywood collectors and into the lucrative New York market but, as long as the current excitement around contemporary art continues, he looks, for all his alleged dislike of the capitalist system, like a solid investment.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New York graffiti artist who died in 1988 at the age of 28, is the example to all ambitious street artists. He managed to convert the energy and imagination of Bebop and the Beat poets into paint, and his drug-infused “Palm Springs Jump” (1982), a rare seminal work on offer at Christie’s in London, in the evening of February 6 (the Postwar and Contemporary sale) could make a record £5m.

Christie’s also has two works by Banksy in its day-sale, including a version of “Bomb Love”, with a £40,000 estimate.

The HMV one in his book has the reflection you mention. Like it's a glossy floor. I guess he did that for the prints and not for the stencils he did

I need to send my passport details to them tomorrow and hope it's in time!

Isn't the Baldwin the one from the Forster Gallery exhibition? My orginal is FS by the way if anyone's interested