Sotheby's cleans up on Banksy at £500k a time

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/06/sothebys-banksy-artist-exhibition-street-art

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If a piece by Banksy had appeared in the grand streets around Sotheby's in Mayfair 10 years ago, it would have been removed as fast as the street cleaners could get there. Today it would be removed just as quickly, but to sell for a substantial sum on the open market.

The auction house is about to open to the public a retrospective of work by the artist who, despite many rivals for the throne, remains the king of street art. It is curated by his former agent, now an independent gallery owner, Steve Lazarides.

Most of the pieces are for sale, at prices up to £500,000, including the stuffed rat. Armed with a tiny spray can with which it had apparently written "our time will come", the creature briefly became part of the displays in the Natural History Museum in 2004.

Lazarides says the 10 years he spent as Banksy's photographer, fixer, van driver, and eventually agent – after discovering he was about to sell a stack of screen prints for a fiver each – was the most fun he's ever had. He upped the prints to £25 unsigned, £125 signed, but even Lazarides found it hard to shift the signed ones. Some are now in the exhibition, selling at £40,000 and more. Much more for the Andy Warhol-inspired one of Kate Moss as Marilyn Monroe, which he persuaded the model to sign herself when she popped into his gallery.

For years after one early exhibition where hundreds of live rats were allowed to run around the gallery floor, Lazarides said he could always recognise a painting from the show on a collector's walls because of the tang of rodent pee.

The two men parted company years ago, and the exhibition – in Sotheby's recently opened selling gallery, across the road from the auction rooms – is billed as "the Unauthorised Retrospective". "I emailed his people, they know. Not pleased," Lazarides said. Banksy will, however, profit from the show, under the artist's resale rights provision that gives him from 4% of the price of each work up to a cap of about £9,000.

As Banksy pieces have reappeared for sale, and prices soared – collectors reputedly include Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, while the Brighton mural version of Kissing Coppers eventually sold in the US for £350,000 – bitter disputes have broken out over their ownership. Owners of the walls have cut out chunks of masonry and plaster to remove them for sale, mourned by local people who had enjoyed the eruption of art into their streets.

Local politicians got involved in 2012 when Slave Labour – a young boy hunched over a sewing machine turning out union flag bunting in the year of the Queen's diamond jubilee – was removed from the wall of a Poundland shop in Wood Green, north London. Despite many attempts to block the sale, and legal challenges over ownership which led to a sale in Miami being abandoned, it was eventually sold in London for an undisclosed sum.

The Sincura Group, which is behind many recent attempts to sell street pieces, abandoned a proposed online auction predicted to raise £2m.

In Bristol in April a new Banksy – Mobile Lovers, painted on a wooden panel in a doorway, showing a couple embracing while surreptitiously checking their smartphones – was crowbarred off the Broad Plain boys' club almost as soon as it appeared. Banksy gave his blessing to its sale to raise funds for the struggling institution, but the city authorities claim ownership. The row rumbles on while the piece is temporarily sheltered in the city museum, where people queued around the block in 2009 to see his first official museum exhibition.

Lazarides will not deal in the street pieces, and regards their removal as an outrage. "I think it's morally wrong to take these pieces off the streets," he said. "They were put there for the general public, not for one person to take away. I think London is the poorer for the loss of all these pieces. As for the argument that they're being removed to protect them, that's just bullshit."

All the paintings and prints in the exhibition were originally produced for sale, which some have seen as street artists selling out to the establishment but Lazarides thinks is perfectly fine. He says the Tate should buy some.

Sotheby's itself and its clients are mocked in one of the works: after a six-figure auction of his work in 2007, Banksy put an image on his website showing a packed sales room bidding for the framed words "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit". Two prints of it are for sale.

Cheyenne Westphal, head of contemporary art at Sotheby's, revealed that the auction house was Banksied, when a stencilled rat appeared on its walls on the night of the famous Damien Hirst sale. It has not survived.

Lazarides remains more or less loyal to the brand. He says Banksy's anonymity was always self-defence, not self-promotion. Asked by one reporter to describe him, he said: "Little guy, so high, rides around on a mobility scooter – I'm not going to tell you that, it would be like telling a five-year-old about Father Christmas."

Banksy: the Unauthorised Retrospective, Sotheby's, London, free. 11 June – 25 July.