How (not) to buy a Banksy online: Real fake or fake original

By B. Bernsteiner

Increasing popularity of street art is changing the art market and its laws. What used to be rather noble and elitist is now tangential to provocation and art from the street, and fetches top prices. A controversy has arisen among artists themselves: whether street art, once created in public space, belongs in private collections. An art form that is ephemeral in its basic nature, because graffiti or street art are usually not designed for eternity, is countering increasing commercialization through wanton devaluation; artists destroy and remove their works as soon as they run the risk of becoming valuable or commercially abused, sometimes as part of the public staging.

The object documented in the book, a rusty wheel clamp, which due to various traces can be attributed to Banksy's environment, exemplifies this controversy. Could an artist want to devalue an original as a forgery, or does an alleged forgery thus become an original?

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Dec 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9783347814974

B. Bernsteiner

B. Bernsteiner ist begeisterter und erfahrener Graffiti-Sammler. Er ist Unternehmer und lebt mit seiner Familie und vielen Tieren in einem ländlichen Gebiet in Deutschland. Seit gut 20 Jahren sammelt er Graffiti Kunst und hat zahlreiche Bekannte aus diesem Umfeld.

Book preview

I Intro

After buying it online and developing my own story about it, I kinda don't even care if it's real or not. It's just there. It's a yellow steel wheel clamp, spray-painted purple and overlaid with what appears to be a simple stencil image of the kind Banksy painted in Bristol and London around the 2000s. I got into this story while I was in the process of expanding my art collection. Focus on graffiti. I have never painted (with profession), but I have always had friends who were more or less good at it: I know a few collectors, gallery owners and activists; some deep rooted to the scene. I always saw pictures and artists that definitely had potential. When I was at an exhibition opening in Hamburg in 2001, I probably even stayed in the same building as Banksy, where he had appeared anonymously with his typical works and the who's who of the scene. That was a central impetus for deepening my interest in graffiti. This art form, which is very fleeting in itself, has more and more found its way into our house, on canvas or as objects. My interest in art comes from my parents' home. An edition print with a signature was already something special. I've always been interested in how the pictures get on the walls. Art with a graffiti context made of spray paint (and also without) is and has been familiar to me for a long time and has accordingly shaped my personal focus for a long time.

The dream of owning a Banksy is present. Who doesn't have it? People used to want a Picasso, later a Warhol. Owning a Banksy today is the absolute creme de la creme of the art market. Nobody gets past it. With his crazy productions, he regularly appears in the mass media. Charmingly always critical, even when it comes to money. Whether a shredded work, a bunch of reigning monkeys - that not only makes headlines in the art scene, apart from the subversive Banksy stagings without a direct value in the art market. That always impresses me. In the meantime every publication on his site has a public impact.

Dream. Reality. Banksy. So I figured an attic find or something like that would be great and startet seeking for it. Of course, it was a challenge for an online marketplace even if it was rather unusual for me and my art search. So far I have bought our works from international galleries, from auction houses or directly from the artist.

Suddenly it was there, I found something. It was a double pack, two objects attributed to the artist Banksy; Self pickup against cash in southern Germany. Documented with half a dozen photos. The level of abstraction between the work and the presentation on the online marketplace was already very high, but suddenly a few photos were enough for me to invest the value of a good fraction of our collection in a Banksy online. I was totally convinced. No, I didn't just do it carelessly. In addition to the desire to get closer to these two objects as quickly as possible, my acquired skepticism also slowed me down. Should my dream come true? I felt like I hadn't woken up. I took screenshots of the offer. I absorbed all the information from the seller and put them together like pieces of a puzzle. That started my