The Tamesis
Loïc Gouzer thinks the art world doesn’t understand Banksy. In fact, he thinks it scares him.
On May 20, Gouzer’s auction platform Fair warning will be sold Girl and balloon on discovered landscapeA painting from Banksy’s “Crude” collection, at a live, invitation-only auction held at Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue flagship store. The work, which features the artist’s signature red heart-shaped balloon floating past a young girl, alters a frugal landscape painting, is estimated at $13 to $18 million and will be displayed to the public in stores before the auction.
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For Furusawa, the scene was part stunt, part argument. Street artist in a luxurious temple. A controlled, almost private auction, spectacular. And, as he freely admits, it’s also a lot of fun. But the real focus is Banksy himself. “I think he’s the most influential artist of our time,” Gurzer said. “Whether we like him or not.”
That statement sounds hyperbolic when many in the art world believe that grabbing Banksy’s headlines is, at best, a guilty pleasure. Furusawa leans into this discomfort. He believes that Banksy occupies a position that few artists have: complete independence from the systems that usually confer legitimacy. “The art world has a problem with him,” Furusawa said in a phone interview. “He’s the only artist who really succeeded as an outsider. He wasn’t created by the art world, and they couldn’t control him.”
For Furuze, the closest comparison is Jean-Michel Basquiat. Not stylistically, but structurally. Basquiat was dismissed by the powers-that-be early on, he said, making the museum and committee’s collecting efforts slow and even harder to recognize what they were missing.
History and markets quickly catch up. In 2017, Basquiat’s “Untitled” (1982) was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $110.5 million, far exceeding its estimate of $60 million, firmly placing the artist among the most expensive names on the market. The buyer, Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa, later loaned the painting to exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Seattle Art Museum, and it appeared in a major 2019 survey by the Brandt Foundation.
Furusawa considers this arc to be instructive and unfinished for Banks. “No major state museum has the courage to display Banksy’s work,” he said. “They’re going to regret it.” He added that when these shows do happen, they come for the wrong reasons. “They do it because the crowd wants to see it,” he said, “not because they understand.”
His belief extended to the market. Furusawa has been saying for years that Banksy could become a $100 million artist. He did not abandon these claims. “I said Basquiat would get there in our lifetime, and he did,” he said. “I think Banks would too.”
The auction itself is only the third time Fair Warning has held a live auction. For a piece like this, it makes sense to bring collectors together in a room, he said, even though he’s spent years trying to strip the auction of its usual drama.
When asked how this approach differs from Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s recent partnership with LGD Hammer to launch a private auction format, which will sell works by Willem de Kooning later this month milkmaid (1984) was estimated at $10 to $15 million, and Furusawa didn’t hesitate. “That piece by de Kooning is very good, but very ordinary,” he said. “As bourgeois as it gets.” According to Furusawa, Banksy was at the other end of the spectrum. Which is why he wants to sell it now.
