Banksy: The Unauthorised Retrospective, S|2

A Banksy Retrospective? Sotheby’s are playing some cunning tricks on the elusive street artist with this ‘Unauthorised’ show curated by Steve Lazarides

The back story…

Everyone is aware of the anonymous street artist known by the nom-de-plume 'Banksy'. For over two decades his witty, stencilled one-liner images have appeared (and sometimes disappeared) like fungi overnight in UK streets. Somehow, the Bristolian artist has maintained a fugitive mystique that’s enormously helped his anti-establishment identity and message. 

Once merely a British phenomenon, as the 2000s unfurled Banksy started to become really huge when he was discovered by America and the world. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie even endorsed him. In 2013,  a piece called Slave Labour – showing a boy on his knees sewing Union Jack bunting to commemorate (or admonish) the Queen's Diamond Jubilee – was levered off a north London wall and found its way to Miami to be put on sale. That particular sale was help up, but serious money had started to congregate around Banksy with  his famous Kissing Coppers selling for $575,000 in Miami earlier this year.

The exhibition…     

Now comes another extraordinary chapter to the Banksy story. Sotheby’s S|2 contemporary space is putting on an exhibition curated by Steve Lazarides, the man who was Banksy’s agent until 2008, when arguably, he was doing his best work. It’s a selling exhibition, which includes canonical images from the Banksy back catalogue like Avon and Somerset Constabulary from Bristol (2000), and the Guantanamo Bay ‘Crude Oil’ painting from his Los Angeles exhibition in 2006. This interest from Sotheby's seems to cement the idea that Banksy's work has joined the belly of the establishment beast. Lazarides notes that when he was managing Banksy, some of these images went for £25 unsigned, £125 signed. Now they reach prices that can soar over £40,000;  his artworks have inflated even more than the London property which is his canvas. The pimpernel-like artist will take royalties from the show, but he’s said to be ‘not pleased’ with it. 

Critical view…

So is a show like this a betrayal of street art's grass-roots energy? If you like. But in reality, graffiti art has long been part of the gallery and biennial whirl. Since the 1980s when Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring burst out of an overflowing New York art scene, the world of street art (it’s never called ‘graffiti’ now) has become enormous. Most of these Banksy’s at Lazarides' exhibition are for sale and cost up to £500,000. So this show, called with literal relish 'Unauthorised Retrospective’, is a gauntlet thrown to Banksy. Surely the perspicacious artist is going to answer? Watch this space…