From Underground to Sotheby’s
The Rise of
Street Art
Since a Banksy was sold
at a Sotheby’s auction for more than 300,000 pounds at the latest, Street
Art has become collectors’ new pet child. But graffiti art made its
breakthrough back in the 1980s, the Deutsche Bank Collection, among
others, acquired works by artists such as Keith Haring and Futura 2000. Tim
Ackermann on the emergence of a subculture.
Desperately
seeking Banksy: over the past several years, the art establishment has
brought forth a human equivalent to the Loch Ness monster with the
anonymous street art megastar. Each year, just in time for the summer
lull, the British media outdo one another in their attempts to track down
the phantom with the spray can. But Banksy has always been an expert at
masking his identity and location. His anonymity is also his protective
shield. After all, he's wanted by the police.
Banksy,
Can't Beat the Feeling, 2006,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
It's around eight years
ago now that the first subversive spray-painted stenciled images initially
appeared in London's East End: small anarchic rats picking locks, sawing
holes into floors, painting over official signs, or otherwise throwing a
wrench into the works of the big city. Elsewhere, there were images of
little girls holding balloons; two police officers passionately kissing
each other; or a gang of apes lurking underneath a railroad bridge in
Shoreditch, and below them the menacing prophecy: "Laugh now, but one day
we'll be in charge." The art was funny and cynical, poetic and political
all at the same time. It was wonderful—and it was free.
The
artist who goes by the alias "Banksy"
has a fairly cynical sense of humor and a keen instinct for the icons of
art history and current events, which he also revealed in his later
marketable works. For instance, in Can't beat the feeling, today a
part of the Deutsche
Bank Collection, he combines the infamous photograph of a Vietnamese
girl fleeing from the Napalm bombs of the American army with pictures of
Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald.
Banksy,
Stop and Search, 2007
Courtesy
the artist and Lazarides Gallery
(c)
Banksy, 2008
From early on, Londoners
grew to love Bansky's trenchant — if not always easily appreciable —
spray-paint images. The works have become a true fixture in the city, and
some are even looked after by neighborhood councils. At the moment,
however, it remains to be seen whether Banksy will continue working in the
streets in the future and delight the art world with more and more daring
actions and sarcastic murals.
This summer, the British Daily
Mail printed an alleged photograph of the spray-paint artist; it also
provided a name: Robin Gunningham. While this latest disclosure might be a
sign that things are closing in for Phantom Banksy — the hype surrounding
the graffiti star keeps growing. It's no longer merely Brad
Pitt, Angelina Jolie,
Christina Aguilera, and Dennis
Hopper who are interested in the Englishman's pictures; over the last
two years, Banksy has conquered the art market in an unparalleled way, and
astronomical sums are now being paid for canvas versions of his
spray-painted stenciled images.
|
Paul Insect, Dead Sid on Gold, 2007
Courtesy
the artist and Lazarides Gallery
Copyright:
Paul Insect, 2008
In October of 2007, the
hammer fell at Sotheby's auction
house on a bid of £322,900 for a genuine Banksy. Another picture was
auctioned off on Ebay for £208,100—including the wall it was sprayed on,
mind you. On the other hand, the unknown collector who chiseled a
spray-painted rat by Banksy out of a cemetery wall and then had the wall
restored for 20,000 Euros wound up with a real bargain, according to a
report in the BZ
in Berlin.
The commotion surrounding Banksy is so great that he has
almost single-handedly established street art as a major new phenomenon on
the art market, flinging the gallery doors open wide for a whole slew of
other street artists. When Paul Insect,
whose work is shown in the same London gallery as Banksy's, had his first
solo exhibition in 2007, it was already sold out before the opening: Damien
Hirst shelled out over half a million pounds.
Faile,
Braving Faile, 2006/2008
Courtesy
the artist and Lazarides Gallery
Copyright:
Faile, 2008
So, are we looking at the
next big sell-out of an urban sub-culture—a culture that, in its temporary
occupation of urban space, has always had a turbulent understanding of the
concept of private property? The big street art market offensive can't be
explained quite this easily, because the scene was never really
homogenous. In the early eighties, when the five boroughs of New York City
were covered by a dense sprawl of graffiti tags; when newspapers starting
printing stories about well-known graffiti artists like Taki
183 and photographers like Henry
Chalfant documented the graffiti-covered subway trains of New
York—when the subcultural phenomenon of graffiti was about to take a
serious leap across the Atlantic towards Europe, the term "street art" was
coined in reference to a special sub-genre of spray-paint art. The Briton John
Fekner, who with his slogans and sprayed dates was one of the pioneers
of this movement, recalls the scene's skepticism towards the new label in
the book Street
Art — The Graffiti Revolution: "We laughed at the term
"street art". If you had a degree, you did "street art" as opposed to
graffiti."
Even if Fekner's description
isn't quite correct in its generalization, a fundamental difference has
remained: classical graffiti artists work for a hermetically sealed
insider circle. With their nearly indecipherable tags, they make their
mark in as wide a radius as possible in the city space, communicating with
one another but not with the rest of the public.
Futura
2000, ohne Titel, 1984,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
[1]
[2]
|
