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The street art market continues its growth: from its beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s to the present day, its prices have increased more and more and it now has the first position in the art market.
Born in New York in the 1960s with artists like Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Urban Art has always fascinated the public. It was a means of expression for a sub-culture that with spray cans and stencils launched strong messages, often criticizing the system.
In America the new-born street art was dominated by New York graffiti, while in Europe it took different features. Blek le Rat (French), for example, chose the stencil technique, but he showed the same revolutionary energy.
Today, things have changed. In the last 10-20 years, the interest of the public, art critics and institutions in Street Art has grown. As a result, Street Art has started to move more and more from the streets to art galleries, museums and the most renowned collections in the world.
THE GROWTH OF BANKSY AND MR. BRAINWASH
Steve Lazarides, the man who brought Banksy into the art market, highlighted the return on investment of the Bristol street artist:
"Going back a decade, if you take one of those artworks that I sold for 149.99 pounds ($192.10), something of that value at that time would be worth upwards of 300,000 to 400,000 pounds ($384,000 to $512,000). So that’s a pretty good return in your investment in a 10-year period" - Steve Lazarides
From £149.99 to £400,000 - an increase of over 250,000%.
And in 2021, Banksy twice surpassed his 2019 personal record of £8.5m of Devolved Parliament, the work showing the British Parliament populated by chimpanzees rather than politicians. In March 2021, Game Changer, the work dedicated to doctors and nurses engaged in the fight against Covid-19, scored £14.4m, but on 14 October Love is in the Bin, the Balloon Girl shredded at auction a few years earlier, reached £16m, the artist's current record.
The most authoritative market analysis have highlighted that the value of Banksy's works at auction and the number of sold lots have grown exponentially in recent years. In 2016, the street artist's auction total was around €2.4 million, compared to more than €116 million in 2021. And the number of lots sold has also grown from 213 in 2016 to 983 in 2021.
Banksy: auction turnover and sold lots
And if we look at Mr. Brainwash, a street artist with a more recent entry into the market but in great demand, we notice the same thing. For the French artist, 2021 saw an auction turnover of around €425,000, compared with €170,000 in 2016, while the number of lots sold rose from 53 in 2016 to 115 in 2021.
STREET ART AT AUCTION
Major reports have shown that Street Art is at the top. In fact, Basquiat, the Andy Warhol-era street artist who is increasingly in demand among collectors, is the artist with the highest total auction value in 2021. And in second place is Banksy.
Basquiat represented 14% of the entire Contemporary Art market at auction and Banksy 7%. An impressive result considered that, just a few decades ago, the system was still struggling to "take seriously" the Street Art movement.
And if we continue to scroll down the list, we find street artist Keith Haring in ninth position and KAWS in fifteenth.
Weight of the top 5 artists on the total Contemporary Art auction revenue (2020/21)
If we look at Italy, we find the same growth: the prices of a street artist like Mr. Savethewall have in fact doubled in the last three years.
We can conclude that 2021 has marked the consolidation of Street Art, certainly not a temporary trend, but a well-established phenomenon. Although we cannot know the future of the art market, the interest in Street Art is far from waning and investing in urban art is once again one of the best choices in terms of return on investment and cultural value.
