STREET VALUE

ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS

Once derided as vandalism, urban art is beginning to attract serious collectors, and serious prices as well.

ONE EVENING IN EARLY FEBRUARY, BONHAMS auction house in London was covered in spray paint, marker pens and graffiti for its first ever Urban Art Sale. The elegant New Bond Street address may have looked a little more studiously scruffy than usual, but the prices confirmed that the prestigious auction house’s foray into urban art was perfectly in keeping with its high net worth ethos. For example, Nick Walker’s stencilled Moona Lisa (an image of Da Vinci’s famous muse bending over to show her bottom) was valued at £5,000 (€6,500), but eventually reached £54,000 (€71,000).

Perhaps inevitably, Banksy was the star of the show. The catalogue for the sale had a Banksy on the cover, and 20 of his pieces were on sale inside, including Laugh Now, which sold for £228,000 (€298,000). Last October, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt paid £1m (€1.3m) for Banksy works at a sale in Soho organised by his London gallerist Steve Lazarides, and more bizarrely, an entire wall painted on by Banksy was bought earlier this year for £208,100 (€272,000), not including the £5,000 (€6,500) or so it would cost to remove the piece. So why is graffiti art – or urban art, as its practitioners and dealers prefer it to be called – becoming so popular?

“Urban art seems set to become the next Pop Art, with graphic imagery that is reduced to its simplest form,” says Acoris Andipa, director of Knightsbridge’s Andipa Gallery, home to a sellout show of Banksy’s work this March. Some 2,500 people visited the gallery, and it was only a show of works from the so-called secondary market, with not an original piece in sight. Many of the visitors had come to see Painting Everyone Always Says They Want To Buy But No One Does, an early work featuring sharks circling a shopping trolley of goldfish, on sale for £495,000 (€647,000). “Urban art also perfectly mirrors today’s society and our concerns. This is what good contemporary art is about – answering or provoking questions,” says Andipa.

With six- figure sums commonplace, though, it’s unlikely that collectors will find a Banksy bargain. So what about the next big thing? Whose work remains affordable but has the potential to rise in value over the next decade? Paul Insect is a 36-year-old British artist whose print Elvis is Lot 71 carried an estimated price tag of £5,000-£8,000 (€6,500-€10,000) at the Bonhams sale. Last year Insect was due to have his first solo exhibition, but before it opened Damien Hirst bought the entire collection for £500,000 (€650,000), making Insect an overnight phenomenon. His new work remains a good investment opportunity, as does the work of such underground luminaries as D*Face, M.I.A, Faile, Swoon, Adam Neate and Andrew McAttee. Urbanangel.com is a good way of keeping in touch with such trends, offering a good selection of the best talent to suit all budgets and tastes.

Andipa can only see a growth in the market: “I expect that more art buyers, be they first-timers or seasoned collectors, will turn their attention to this art movement, so we anticipate the interest will increase. I think we are just seeing the very beginning – it has a long way to go. What’s exciting is that it still seems to be in its infancy and yet some artists’ work is selling for close to $2m. There is no reason why the prices should not continue to rise as more buyers get into the market.”

Bonhams’ urban art specialist Gareth Williams agrees. “The art market for contemporary cutting edge art is booming. What February’s sale does is show how urban art has emerged from an underground sub-culture to the mainstream. In Britain this has only really happened in the past four or five years. Urban art is art at its most accessible, available in the public arena for universal appreciation.”