Banksy’s “girl with balloon” was just auctioned off expensive, as the artists, let it shred. This is a criticism of the art market, or a successful PR campaign? We take a look behind the Scenes.
A good four months, the spectacular action of the street artist Banksy is back. At Sotheby’s in London whizz on a Friday in October, the Hammer of the auctioneer. Banksy’s painting “girl with balloon” switches for 1.04 million pounds the owner, as a beep is heard. The small girl slips through the frame. What comes out of the bottom, is cut into narrow strips. Someone is filming the process. On the social networks, the message in the wind – is spreading around the world.
Has Banksy criticizes, such as a video on Instagram suggests that the art market? Possible. His painting has one of those absurdly high prices. And also, the artist has removed his work to the market through destruction. But what the anarchy is when all Parties of Banksy’s action benefited the Ersteigerin, whose work on value probably massively puts, the auction house, which landed a Coup, and, finally, the mystery artist’s self-shrouded, its popularity grew once more explosively?
Auction at Christie’s in New York
Split Art World
Banksys action splits the art world. Henrik Hanstein, President of the European fossils of the Eiger Association (EFA), and chief of the Cologne auction house Lempertz, considered Banksy’s action as a “great PR move for the artist as for the auctioneer”. Nevertheless, he believes in a presentation: “A auctioneer ought to dispel such an image and photograph,” says Hanstein, is a long time in the business. “And when artists mock their own prices, as does Gerhard Richter, you can sell your own images cheaper. You don’t have to do.”
An “embarrassing Marketing gimmick” and a “stitch-up between the artist and the auction house is” outraged Erhard Witzel. The art collector runs an exhibition house in Dornbirn, Austria, and a gallery in Wiesbaden. Recently, he’s art buyers the collection of the Federal state of Vorarlberg.
Dietmar Elger, head of the Richter archive in Dresden, holds Banksy’s criticism is understandable: “it is but scratched everything possible from the walls, just to make it money.” Just like in the case of judges, from whose trash someone fumbled two overpainted photos. A judge has seizures. About the whereabouts of a court to decide.
Henrik Hanstein from Kunsthaus Lempertz
Self marketing Yes, but “Robin Hood intentions” does not want to recognize Wolfgang Ullrich, in the case of Banksy. The Leipzig cultural scientist and publicist, is a sought-after expert when it comes to the practices of the art market, also in the Museum Burda, Baden-Baden, where the “girl with the red balloon” is currently on display. The artist changed it, in the meantime, in “Love is in the Bin”.
No one had been harmed, Ullrich, on the contrary: “Actually, Banksy has supported the logic of the art market.” For years, the auction houses, with always new scandals topics – be it that of an algorithm-generated images auctioned a Ferrari as a contemporary art offered or a 500-year-old da-Vinci-paintings in the category of “Post-war and Contemporary Art” under the Hammer. “They were all great upsets, and so you have to see this Banksy-history.”
Dietmar Elger head of the Gerhard Richter archive
The Global Art Market
“My car, my Yacht, my Leonardo” – this sentence would be typical for the collector of a now globalized art market. More and more super-rich from Eastern Europe, Asia or the Arab countries to buy art. “There are very many people with lots of money are on the go,” says gallery owner Witzel. “To see art as a pure Business, the rate of return.”
The business magazine “Forbes” currently the world’s 2000 billionaires. Nicolas Orlowski, the chief of the Parisian auction house Artcurial believes that their number doubled in the next five years, as he revealed recently, the Berliner “Tagesspiegel”. “The same kind of art, which took place before a few hundred people interested,” says auction expert Hanstein, “now launches to a few Thousand. This drives the prices up.” A hunt for trophies.
In 2008, almost 13 million Euro auctions: Damien Hirst’s “the Golden bull”
More buyers, higher prices – known artists stylize themselves to luxury brands. “Everyone wants to have his Jeff Koons,” says Hanstein, “now the global brands of the art business.” Understandable that wealthy collectors put on the icons of a well – established world of taste, with works by Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons. This promises to be a status gain, and at the same time a safe investment. The Online Portal “Artnet” calculates that half of the world’s auction achieved sales of contemporary art with 25 artists.
The Playground of the billionaires
But is well worth the investment in art? Although art may satisfy aesthetic needs, and a collective passion to satisfy. However, in terms of their increase in value, art is often not as securities. For one, this can be, unlike works of art – freely traded. Art sellers have to share your profits with auction houses. Not to mention the costs for storage and insurance. “Unlike in the stock market, it has to earn the normal citizens in the art market hard, really money,” warned the Brussels-based art historian and Finance Professor Kim Oosterlinck recently in an Interview with the weekly newspaper “die Zeit”.
The most expensive work by a living artist David Hockneys “Portrait of an Artist”
And what the auction price says about the value of a work? Not much, believes cultural scientists Ullrich. “They are actually an indicator for the purchasing power of those who bid here.” Auction proceeds are in databases such as Artnet, Lot-They, MutualArt, or Artprice searchable. Private and gallery sales are recognized. Only in mid-February David Hockneys Pool painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) made it” with an auction, the proceeds of 90.3 million dollars in the headlines as the most expensive work by a living artist. “The media only see the lucrative part of the market, the luxury segment,” criticized Ullrich. “A lot of the other falls down in the back.”
Tunnel vision in the industry?
In fact, the focus has pages on a few of the artists and his shadow. A, Ullrich, young artists claimed to be based on the success of artists by providing them copied. A fall in the price of older works of art, precious furniture or porcelain auction expert Hanstein is complaining of. The industry, he certified in a tunnel vision: “We see what is in the Mainstream, but much to the right and to the left of it.”
The collector and gallerist Erhard Witzel
The most notable would be the impact on the collectors, but: “Younger people are scared when they see the prices,” says Erhard Witzel. Of course, it was “chic to buy art,” is convinced of the collector, and gallerist. He summons the passion of collecting, which arises in him, “in the heart and in the soul”, and the fact that he was involved with the purchased Work-intensive. Witzel wants: “We need to create awareness that art is a – and the money to the other.”