Don’t bank on rising Banksy prices
It’s been a long time since there was a big Banksy exhibition, but this week his former dealer, Steve Lazarides, is opening one at his new gallery in Mayfair. Prices could be as much as £6million for one of the larger works – a far cry from the artist’s humble beginnings on the streets of Bristol, in the early Nineties.
Famously anonymous, Banksy became well-known very quickly – almost as well-known, in fact, as his old pal and oft-suggested alter ego, Damien Hirst. (His identity remains a closely guarded secret, but Robert Del Naja, of the band Massive Attack, and Bristol resident Robin Gunningham are the most popular theories.)
Yet, even though Girl with Balloon, Banksy’s 2004 print of a girl flying a heart-shaped red balloon, was voted the most popular artwork in Britain last year, he is yet to be collected by any museum.
Perhaps the opportunity for them to buy one passed a while back because, as the press release to Lazarides’s exhibition points out, Banksy’s work was subject to a meteoric price rise earlier this century. A print of Kate Moss, for instance, that would have cost £49.99 when it was first released in 2005, sold for £100,000 in 2008.
But what the release doesn’t tell you, is that this figure is still a record for a Kate Moss print by Banksy. By 2012, prices had sunk to £28,000, and have yet to come near that high mark again.
Like many other contemporary artists, Banksy’s market is prone to sudden price hikes. In the beginning, he was one of the first artists of the social media age. His collectors formed a kind of messaging club, so that everyone knew the price of everything and any shift in price was registered in an instant. Trading up became part of the game.
Now, something similar is happening. In the past 12 months, a number of Banksy’s spraypainted works have exceeded estimates by two or three times. In June 2017, for example, a painting of a monkey wearing a sandwich board that says, “Laugh now; but one day we’ll be in charge”, sold for a double estimate £293,000.
Then, in March this year, Girl with Balloon doubled estimates to sell for £345,000; and, in June, Keep it Real, 2002, an eight-inch square variation on the monkey sandwich board theme, sold at eight times its £50,000 estimate, for £418,000.
As Lazarides reminds us, Keep it Real originally cost £250, so it comes as no surprise, perhaps, that he has organised a Banksy exhibition just as the market seems to be reaching another boiling point.
Auction experts attribute the current Banksy wave in part to the increase in global demand for his work.
At first, buyers were primarily limited to locals in the film and music business, who enjoyed the irreverence the work carried. But an audience quickly took hold in Los Angeles, with the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie becoming fans.
And during the past five years, demand has spread to Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. The buyer of Banksy’s Laugh Now painting, sold last summer for £293,000, was Asian, Bonhams tells me.
However, there are other experts who are not sure the bigger prices are the real thing. Acoris Andipa, a private dealer who recently curated a Banksy exhibition at a museum in Rome, says he is aware that some paintings have been bought on the private market for as much as £1.5million. (Banksy’s auction record is currently £950,000, paid by Damien Hirst’s dealer, Jay Jopling, in 2008, for a big Banksy painting that incorporated a Hirst painting.)
“It’s a healthy, buoyant market, but £400,000 for an eight-inch painting produced in an edition of 25 [for Keep it Real], and £6million for a large unique work [one of those at the Lazarides exhibition] is a myth,” says Andipa.
“On the private market, owners are playing a game with buyers in which they quote a price and, when it is accepted, put it up… again and again. They don’t really have any intention of selling; they just want to put the value up and compete with each other.
“At auction, some of the works that have been doubling estimates did so because the estimates were just too low. But I am intrigued to know who bought and underbid
Keep it Real at that price. I know most of the collectors in the Banksy market, and none would have bid that high.
“I think we need to see whether that price is repeated – more than once – before we go running around revaluing all our Banksy’s to such a degree.”
Like many other contemporary artists, Banksy’s market is prone to sudden hikes