As Bansky sells out in UK and trend storms forward, more and more TO street artists are headed indoors. Now a new street art gallery called Show and Tell Gallery has opened in Toronto. Vladimir Kato's acrylic on masonite DUNDASS is shown there.
Far from its inglorious beginnings, graffiti has become the next big thing. Book stores are flush with volumes on Banksy and other celebrated "lowbrow" artists (so called because many of them took a pass on art school). Galleries specializing in work once done at night in back alleys are springing up everywhere - including Toronto.
The city has long been a hotbed for street art, as is obvious when strolling the colourful laneways north and south of Queen Street West or when riding the Bloor-Danforth subway, and now it has its own graffiti gallery, Show & Tell in the Dundas and Ossington neighbourhood.
Show & Tell owner Simon Cole, 26, knows a bit about tagging, and says "the graffiti community" has been very supportive. However, he wants to be known as more than a graffiti gallery. "I work with artists from unconventional backgrounds," is how he puts it. "The street-art world runs parallel to the fine-art world. You don't see too many street artists in blue-chip galleries."
Cole has assembled an impressive cast of street artists, including American and international artists who otherwise wouldn't be seen in Canada. "People dig that." Recently featured at the gallery were Yugoslavian-born Vladimir Kato and Toronto's Ryan Dineen, who did a very brief stint at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD).
Opening on July 10 is an exhibition by a trio of artists headed by New York street legend Steve J. Powers, who is known in the graffiti world as Espo (for Exterior Surface Painting Outreach) and was even included in the 49th Venice Biennale.
London-based Steve Lazarides, Britain's premier dealer in street art, has coined a new term for such work, calling it "cult art." As one of his recent press releases said, "The absolute core of cult art is its accessibility to its public."
However, thanks in large part to artists such as Banksy, "cult art" is becoming less accessible all the time, as prices have skyrocketed.
Banksy, said to be from Bristol, England, but otherwise anonymous despite numerous attempts to expose him, is revered for his anti-establishment imagery, showing cops kissing, snorting cocaine and frisking little girls. He's fond of rats, too. As he explained in his best-selling book Wall and Piece , "If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model."
Amidst great secrecy - this writer was in Bristol a month ago and not a word was said - Banksy has just begun a 2½-month run at Bristol's City Museum and Art Gallery, with some 100 works on display, most never seen before. "This is the first show I've ever done where taxpayers' money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off," he told the BBC. The gallery, perhaps tongue in cheek, calls him one of "the region's most overrated artists," while telling visitors that they can expect waits of up to an hour.
Overrated or not, Cole says he'd "probably be in a different tax bracket now" if he had bought Banksy when he first heard of him. His signed prints now command as much as $30,000 and his originals - some of them affixed to newspaper boxes or even chiselled off walls - many times that. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are among his well-heeled collectors. Cyclist Lance Armstrong is another with a passion for such art.
Canada has yet to produce a street artist of that stature, but there are a handful making noise. Cole cited Montreal's Specter, who's been dubbed a "street interventionist," and Toronto's Dan Bergeron (aka fauxreel), known for his "billboard liberations." They are, however, not quite operating under the cover of darkness any more - the latter has showed at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and both have had shows at the Royal Ontario Museum.
Bergeron did get some flak when he got involved in a campaign for Vespa scooters last spring. "People liked it at first because they recognized his imagery," Cole explains. But cheers turned to jeers when the Vespa connection was revealed. Some were ticked that the ads were appearing in spots normally given over to graffiti. Bergeron said it wasn't selling out, that what graffiti artists are selling is "themselves." According to Cole, he used money earned from that gig to fund another project, City Renewal , an indoor, life-size street that also involved Specter.
Even Banksy has come in for criticism since he's taken his act indoors, where he rivals the most fashionable fine artists.
"I'm not sure it's good for them [street artists]to have become established," says London-based pop artist Peter Blake. "What Banksy was about was being illegal. Now, they've pretty much become establishment. That surely goes against what they were trying to do."
Cole couldn't disagree more. "I think that's B.S., to be perfectly honest," he says. "They are just trying to do their thing, bring something else to society."
There's been no stopping Lazarides, who has just opened his second gallery in London's Soho area. His new space, a handsome, five-storey Georgian building called Lazarides Rathbone (for the street on which it sits), was once a brothel. His other gallery, located just around the corner on Greek Street, was previously a shop that dealt in sadomasochistic paraphernalia.
The guest list swelled to 1,200 for the launch of the new gallery and there was little room to manoeuvre, with collectors jostling for a look at work by Invader, Antony Micallef, Zevs, David Choe, Jonathan Yeo, Faile, Bast and other street stars. There were Banksys to be seen, too, in a special viewing area upstairs.
Lazarides finds it easy to justify the hefty price tags on the work he shows. As he told Juxtapoz, a California-based graffiti magazine, "If you kept the prices down and went, 'I'll take it and sell it for 50 bucks,' you know damn well that tomorrow that painting's on eBay for $50,000."
Yet, word is that even Banksy is having reservations about his massive success (though he has been quoted as saying, "Money is so much more sexy and interesting than art."). By way of amends, he claims he gives much of his work away. He told The New Yorker he was once trying to save the world, "but now I'm not sure I like it enough."
The Internet is fuelling the demand for street art, as Cole can attest. "I wouldn't be around if it wasn't for the Internet," he says. "It's huge. It's changed the game." And while there's growing interest in such art in Toronto, "they get it more in other cities." He has had dealings in London, and all across the United States, specifically, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.
"People are starting to take notice that there's life in Canada," he added. But while that's good for business, will business be the undoing of street art?