Weren't his last prints like 3500? With ones 8x8" for 1500 or something incredibly dumb? 

Fine art is responsible for an awful lot of tat these days.

Cleon stinks like stagnant water. And i own a print.
But he does have the connections to have his ego blow up so big. You dont paint for the rothschilds and under the Eiffel tower without some serious pull.

Theres a video of a cleon show where he is trying to talk about some abstract wood pieces. He seemed genuinely interested jn that kind of art. Which is funny because hes painted himself into a pretty small corner.

also, where does cleon go from with his current work. im very interested to see.
I do really like his sculptures but maybe some new characters. i can see that getting old

A Porsche, a luxury watch and a breakfast cereal. Loads of possibilities left.

I don't know all the machinations of what occurred, but I don't see any issues with an artist wanting to control his/her environment. Artists are all competing with each other for scratch. It's just part of life. The print was pretty ugly and if Cleon feels that he's of another tier, then why not use your influence to distance yourself from that. The unfortunate thing is......that because of this childish squabble, we'll no longer have this possible collab print.

cleon’s art is really relatable.

We can boycott Cleon all we want, but I don't believe Lex Luthor and other big collectors give a damn about the whole situation.

 Surely it is the artists themselves that decide to play the game of these rich manipulaters that are motivated by money and are the opportunists. 

   Since when has street art scene been genuine. For  along time now, graphic artists etc have used walls to paint on to promote themselves and their print sales. I thought Fairey Kaws Invader were motivated by money and profit since a long time ago. Along comes some mega wealthy player who decided to set up a gallery and take advantage of the opportunity to hype up prices and promote some artists and these artists go along with the setup. Then blame them for being sellouts not the people with the money who easily manipulate and influence the art market as that has been going on since the turn of the last century.

    No one knows if these record prices achieved at auction are real or fake. People do not realise how easy it is to get an auctioneer to fake bid up the selling price at auction, even in the large auction houses. The auction houses are in on it because they need the publicity of record sales which attracts buyers to their sales and keeps the urban art sales going for the time being.

  Whether Kaws or Invader sold for over a million in an auction room for real or whether it was chandelier bidding and the auctioneer in on it makes no difference to me.

  Art is worth what someone wants to pay for it. Kaws prints sell for thousands at auction it appears but if offered one, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of hundred quid for one as that's all it's worth to me. I know that there are people who have bought into the smoke and mirrors of Mugrabiism and see people paying thousands, so they decide to pay thousands too. Obscene amounts of money are paid for mundane art for various reasons.

  The wealthy, the large galleries big dealers collectors and auction houses are all in bed together. Creating an illusion to get people to invest in and part with their money. They need certain artists to promote and hype up and build the brand to keep the money rolling in. These artists that decide to play that game, know what they are getting into and know where their loyalties lie. They are going where the money is and that's fine if that's what they want. Some are probably patting themselves on their own backs and thinking how easy it was to use urban art to build a following to be able to move up to selling at major auction houses.

  If it's street art you care about then forget them and support other street artists that have that love of art and urban outsider in them.

      Street artists in a way are like buskers. They do their stuff in the streets because they want to share what they do with people and start out as unknown same as buskers do. Then one day some Scott Aitken Cowell type character spots them and thinks. That with their contacts and influence they can get a busker to play to their tune that they dictate and promise the busker that they will become rich only to use them chew them up and dump them after a while. Buskers fine like that because they become celebrities for a while.

Everything goes out of fashion in the art world . The Chinese wave in the early 2000's was hyped up and fizzled out.

     The Gallery behind Kaws etc is I believe a business registered in Hong Kong and the record sales were in Hong Kong too ?

   Didn't Kaws upset the Chinese govt with some rhetoric he made about the Hong Kong protestors?

  anyway Robert Hughes has been exposing the art fixing and hype for years. This video is worth watching completely but the information about manipulating the art world is 17 minutes into the video.

Damn homey. How long you been writing that essay for.

Which, ironically - given the direction of the thread, is one of the reasons why people originally started writing on walls.