Citing Demand From a New Class of Buyers, Phillips Plans a Selling Show of Banksy and KAWS in New York

Banksy and KAWS dominated
headlines last year. Now, Phillips is hoping to continue to cash in
on the populist artists’ market clout.

The auction house’s first effort
of the new decade will be a selling exhibition dedicated to the two
artists. On view from January 14 through February 10 in New York,
“Ten Monkeys and a Dolphin:
Banksy & KAWS” will
bring together 20 rare and lesser-known paintings, prints, and
sculptures. 

Both Banksy and KAWS reeled in
record-breaking, headline-making prices last year and drew admirers
from outside the rarefied art-collecting community. Banksy’s
DEVOLVED PARLIAMENT
(2019) fetched $12 million
at Sotheby’s London in October, while KAWS’s Sargent
Pepper-meets-The
Simpsons painting
THE KAWS ALBUM
(2019) brought in $14.8
million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in April, nearly 15 times
its high estimate. But Miety
Heiden, Phillips’ head of private
sales, says that those figures were largely anomalous to the
larger trajectory of these popular artists’
markets. 

“We have seen two or three real
outliers in prices, but all the rest are actually very much the
same,” she tells Artnet News. Heiden notes that both established
collectors and people who are just starting to invest in art for
the first time are drawn to the two artists. 

“The market is very deep for
both these artists,” she says. “We see more and more people coming
into this market every day, but it’s still not at the price levels
of Warhol or Basquiat, so it’s still very accessible for a big
group of art collectors.” 

All 20 of the works in the show
come from a single anonymous European seller—the same one Phillips
teamed up with for its Banksy exhibition in
Taipei last year.
(Choosing not to disclose sale details, Heiden characterized the
Taipei exhibition as “Phillips’s most successful event in the
region ever”; four works in the Taipei show will also be offered in
New York). 

Prices in the new show range from $25,000 to between $3 million
and $4 million, notes Heiden, adding that because of the higher
price tags, she doesn’t expect the show to sell out. Among the top
items is Banksy’s Laugh Now (2002), an early
work of a chimpanzee wearing a sign that says, “Laugh now because
one day we’ll be in charge.”

The results of a show like this
are becoming increasingly hard to predict, Heiden says. The way the
market operates is changing rapidly, perhaps more so than ever
before, and these two artists are at ground zero of that sea
change.

“I’ve been in the art market for
a long time—everything is moving much faster now,” Heiden says. “In
the ’90s, we would not sell works made in the previous five
years—that was an absolute no-no. Now, auctions regularly feature
works made, say, the year before. It’s just
normal.” 

“A lot of people accept art now
just because of what they see,” she adds, alluding to the meteoric
market rise of Banksy and KAWS. “They don’t necessarily do a lot of
research or want to see the rest of the oeuvre. They just like
something, they want to have it, and that’s it.”

“Ten Monkeys and a Dolphin:
Banksy & KAWS” will be on view January 14 through February 10 at
Phillips New York.

The post Citing Demand From a New Class of Buyers, Phillips
Plans a Selling Show of Banksy and KAWS in New York appeared
first on artnet News.