But that’s exactly what will happen with British graffiti artist Banksy’s ‘Flower Girl’, in which a girl holding a basket of flowers peers at a security camera emerging from a vine. You could say the trend started in 2008, when eminent auction house, Bonhams, organised a sale dedicated to urban art. Another of Banksy’s pieces, a 2002 mural featuring monkeys emblazoned with the words “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge”, sold for 410,000 USD.
In the case of ‘Flower Girl’ the station’s owner, Eytan Rosenberg, arranged the sale. When selling the family business after his father’s death last year, he had Bansky’s mural removed at a cost of 80,000 USD, which included repairing the wall. Though declaring the piece had become “like a family heirloom”, Rosenberg has put the piece up for sale this December. It’s expected to fetch between 150,000 and 300,000 USD.
This journey from street to auction house illustrates the way the fate of some of Banksy’s work has sparked even greater controversy than the nature of the pieces themselves. It raises questions about how street art changes role and function once it is removed from the public sphere. “Graffiti art has a hard enough life as it is, before you add hedge-fund managers wanting to chop it out and hang it over the fireplace,” the anonymous artist once said. “For the sake of keeping all street art where it belongs, I’d encourage people not to buy anything by anybody, unless it was created for sale in the first place.”
While Banksy himself remains elusive, his work has become instantly recognisable for its irreverence, its social and political critiques of mass surveillance, child labour and police brutality. Think of that girl painted on Israel’s ‘separation fence’, the giant concrete wall built to imprison the Palestinians, who is depicted floating away by holding on to a bunch of balloons or a masked man poised in the act of throwing flowers instead of stones.
Although auction houses still need to authenticate his work – a process that can be complicated, given his secrecy - Banksy is now part of a growing phenomenon in which street art is being traded on the art market. It's ironic, really. The graffiti art movement first developed along with Hip Hop as a reaction against ‘sanctioned art’ by creating art that was public and often illegal, giving voice to the street.
While most street artists cannot control where their art ends up, especially when they paint on property they do not own, ownership wasn’t an issue when the movement started. Neither, for that matter, was authorship. Public murals were seen as transient, to be demolished or painted over, not as permanent works of art to be preserved. Let alone sold.
It’s not that there hasn’t been resistance towards the appropriation of street art. After hearing of the sale of yet another one of his pieces a few years ago, Banksy stencilled a satirical image of an auction with the tagline: “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.”
Sometimes, there are demonstrations by street art aficionados against the sales. Again, Banksy serves as a case in point. The piece in question was ‘Slave Labour’, a mural stencilled on the side of a British discount shop, near one of the flashpoints during the country’s 2011 riots, which features a young boy kneeling over a sewing machine churning out Union Jack flags for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. It was seen as a criticism of the celebration and of sweatshops, after Poundland was accused of using child labour. Protestors managed to stop the first attempt by a Miami auction house in February this year but it was finally auctioned in June in London for a stratospheric 1.1 million USD.
All this suggests that more and more, graffiti art considered ‘valuable’, will be put up for sale by people who simply happen to own the building on which it was painted. An act of protest, of subversion, is privatised and fetishized. The voice of the street becomes a commodity and loses all meaning.
“Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw on whatever they liked,” he once wrote, “where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall – it’s wet.” Perhaps. More likely, it’s no longer there. It’s off, being auctioned to the oligarchs.
