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reviews urban art
nick Walker, Moona Lisa, 2006,
stencil spray paint and acrylic
on canvas, 183 x 122 cm.
Courtesy bonhams, London
‘Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge’, read the sandwich
boards worn by the pissed-off-looking chimpanzees in Banksy’s
enormous spray-stencil work on board Laugh Now (2002).
Ripped from its previous home, in the Ocean Rooms nightclub
in Brighton, the piece formed the backdrop to Bonhams’s first
auction outing into the well-edgy world of ‘urban art’, selling
for a bananas £228,000. Seeing the packed crowd of very well
groomed young men and women eagerly waving their auction
paddles in pursuit of just the right piece of graffiti-on-canvas to
go above the glass dining table in their Hoxton-style loft-style
apartments, you got the feeling that the chimps’ day had finally
come.
As the next auction house down from Sotheby’s , Christies
and Phillips de Pury, Bonhams is putting a lot of effort into the
young-collector market, staging evening auctions of modestly
priced hip art and design objects. But at contemporary art sales
last year, among the Philippe Starck chairs and Allen Jones prints,
it was Banksy who commanded crazy prices – a sale dedicated to
‘urban art’ seemed like a no-brainer.
So what the hell is urban art, and more importantly,
why the mounting interest in its growing market? With Banksy
fast replacing Damien Hirst as the most well known art-name
in Britain, at least in the mainstream media, it’s easy to see the
appeal. Images that draw their iconography and attitude from
street and pop culture, that mine a vein of sarcastic, punkish
humour and don’t mind transferring the cred of their ‘street’
origins to collectors’ walls – girls hugging bombs, British coppers
giving you the finger, pictures of the queen as a skull, Kate Moss
as Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Christ on the cross holding
bags of Christmas shopping – what more do you want, eh?
It wasn’t all Bansky, of course. Prints by Keith Haring and
Takashi Murakami were thrown in, to bring artworld credibility
urbAn Art Auction
to the motley of increasingly visible ‘street’ artists turned art-
market players; names such as Faile, D*Face, Paul Insect and
bonha ms, London Nick Walker, whose intricate, Banksy-ish spray-stencil technique
5 February was a surprise hit, his Moona Lisa (2006) bulldozing its estimated
£3,000–£5,000 to sell for £54k. Haring and Murakami were
sideshows to what was really going on: the opening up of a
market for art that doesn’t really care about the critical and
cultural pretensions of the ‘proper’ artworld and is happy with images that connect a street-style authenticity
with the glamour of celebrity-artist culture. That the majority of the artists should be represented by savvy
urban art galleries Lazarides and Pictures on Walls came as no surprise.
Not surprising either that Hirst has got involved, selling his own work through Filthy Modern Art and
buying into Bansky’s. Nine days later, in New York, at the RED charity auction, a Bansky-modified Hirst spot
painting sold for $1.8m. It’s fitting. As the final resting place of a completely normalised, marketable, toothless
punk stylism, with about as much subversive energy as a copy of The Beano, urban art is also the terminus for
the Young British Artists’s merging of contemporary art with mainstream pop culture, without the pseudo-
conceptualist mucking around. It’s a rat with a bazooka. Great, do you take plastic? J.J. Charlesworth
Artreview 130
REVIEWS_April Part 1.indd 130 3/3/08 13:29:57
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