Steve Lazarides’s latest gallery, his third, is a five-floor townhouse in
Rathbone Place, barely a spit from Oxford Street. On the first three floors,
carpenters are installing temporary walls for Vhils, the 22-year-old
Portuguese artist whose show is about to open. On the fourth floor, Vhils
and some of the gallery’s 12 staff listen to Dizzee Rascal as they tap at
MacBooks in an office adorned with art by Banksy (Flying Copper, from
2003: price on application) and the Faile collective. And right at the top
is Lazarides, head shaved, in jeans and T-shirt, a chunky silver watch
dangling at his wrist, and with the suppressedly manic air of a man trying
gamely, just for an hour or so, to ignore the multiple demands of a bulging
pre-show to-do list.
Lazarides is to this group of “graffiti” artists what Jay Jopling is to Tracey
Emin, the Chapman Brothers and Damien Hirst: their cheerleader, their fixer
— and their dealer. Right now, he is proffering some fine red wine and
contemplating a collective rebranding .
“ ‘Urban art’ doesn’t work,” Lazarides says, once the wine is poured. “
‘Street art’ doesn’t work. ‘Cult art’; that definitely doesn’t work. The
more I think about it the more I think that ‘outsiders’ does fit, in that a
goodly number of them are self-taught and they are all pretty much surviving
in a parallel art world outside the mainstream.”
I could have spluttered in derision at this talk of being an “outsider” coming
from a man with a gallery in London W1, whose clients include bankers,
celebrities and Hirst himself (“I like helping him because he’s changing the
way things are done,” Hirst e-mailed me about Lazarides in 2007). Yet as
well as being a waste of wine, such spluttering would be misplaced.
Bristol-born Lazarides, whose father worked in a kebab shop, started his
working life as a painter and decorator (and occasional chicken-plucker)
after graduating in photography from Newcastle Polytechnic in the early
1990s. Eventually he found a job to go with the degree and was the picture
editor for the magazine Sleazenation when, about a decade ago, he
first met the barely known Bristolian graffiti artist “named” Banksy. Sleazenation
printed a Banksy poster, and Lazarides became the go-to man for anyone
wanting to buy a Banksy — and, by virtue of the anonymity of the artist and
his tight-knit croup of creative compadres, the only identifiable figure in
his group.
Via Lazarides, sales picked up, some from the annual “Christmas Ghetto” shops
in London, others through his print company POW (Pictures on Walls). Yet
Banksy remained an outsider: critics stayed away from his anarchic pop-up
London shows (impromptu exhibitions in unoccupied spaces) and when, in 2003,
he mounted one of his paintings in Tate Britain the museum stiffly announced
its removal to the lost property department. But Banksy and others were
creating a new, young fanbase for new, young art.
“Through Banksy, through Gorillaz or Massive Attack videos on MTV rotation,
millions of people who may not have seen themselves as art lovers were
seeing this and loving it. Art became quite cool. It was cool to pick up a
sketch pad, cool to go into a gallery — it was even cool to maybe buy a
screen print.”
Then, in 2006, Banksy and “street art” suddenly became unignorable, even to
the institutions that had dumped his work in lost property. After a series
of trademark stunts to announce its arrival, Barely Legal, Banksy’s
LA pop-up show in a Skid Row warehouse, opened in September. As well as
making headlines around the world it also made millions: Lazarides sold
almost all 50 or so works to clients including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
(they bought three) and Christina Aguilera (she bought two) for a total of
about $3 million. I remember watching him working the clients: I don’t think
he slept for two days.
Shepard Fairey was an unheralded skateboarding-scene street artist from San
Francisco at the time — he had yet to design the Barack Obama Hope
portrait — and he made this observation: “If you wait for the museums, the
moment will pass you by. Case in point: Banksy’s show got 50,000 visitors in
three days. Rauschenberg’s got 80,000 in three months. Now the art world is
freaking out.”
A few years on, the museums have started to catch up. In Paris the Fondation
Cartier last week opened Born in the Streets: Graffiti, an ambitious
retrospective, while Tate Modern last year showcased six street artists
(including three on Lazarides’s books: Blu, Faile and JR) on its Bankside
façade. “The Tate was great,” Lazarides says. “It was seen by millions of
people. Although they missed a trick not taking the art inside the museum,
too: they could have been full all summer long.”
The critics continue to sniff. Jonathan Jones, a 2009 Turner Prize judge,
recently explained — not that anybody had asked him to — that he would never
nominate Banksy, adding: “The reason I don’t like street art is that it’s
not aesthetic, it’s social. To celebrate it is to celebrate ignorance,
aggression, all the things our society excels at.” Lazarides counters this
by saying: “This art has become popular without critics — despite them, in
fact. So maybe they feel threatened that these devilish children have found
a way of making them become slightly redundant, that the great unwashed
haven’t waited to be decreed what they should or shouldn’t like. I wouldn’t
want to say they are bitter, that’s not quite right —- but they’re not open.
Contemporary art is about having a certain state of mind, not an age group
or a wealth bracket or an art history degree. You are either open to new
ideas or you are not.”
About two years ago Lazarides and Banksy ended their formal working
relationship. “There was no acrimony there,” is all that Lazarides will say
of the parting. “We’d been working together for years and it seemed the
right thing to do. He has gone off to do his own thing, and here I am,
running my gallery.”
Like Jopling, Lazarides has been subject to a bit of schadenfreude of late.
“Some people did mention that moving to a new five-floor gallery in the
teeth of the credit crunch was probably a really bad idea,” he says.
Pre-credit crunch, his shows would sell out before they opened; Hirst spent
£500,000 buying a Paul Insect show; Lazarides took Antony Micallef to Los
Angeles and sold every painting for a total of more than $3 million; a Faile
show in New York did the business too, selling all 100 works at an average
of $10,000 a pop (and don’t forget those lucrative prints).
Post-credit crunch, Lazarides says, “I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t become
harder”, but the art still sells. “The show we did here last [a group show
called Grow Up], I would have been comfortable to sell only 30 per
cent. As it was we sold 70 per cent, and we had a roadblock on the opening
night: a vast spread of clients.” (Since this interview the Vhils show has
opened, and has sold 85 per cent.) “We’ve never relied on one small group,
Russian oligarchs or whoever it might be that has just come into big money.
We’re selling pictures for thousands, not millions. People still have money,
they still like art, and interest rates are low. Where are you going to put
that money? Art’s as safe a market as any, especially if you’re at the lower
end of the market.”
Perhaps, though, some of the punters who bought at the top of the boom in
2007-08 might disagree with this analysis. Lazarides is unruffled: “Look, if
you bought it because you liked it — which is the best and only reason ever
to buy art — then how the hell does what it’s worth now make any difference
to you? And if you bought it as an investment and you’re upset, I’d say show
me another one of your investments that has made money.”
Many truly “street” artists, the taggers, are disdainfully suspicious of
graffiti’s commodification. Yet it is altering the wider public perception
of the art — even among the judiciary. Last month in Southwark Crown Court
Judge Michael Gledhill was about to sentence six Australians called the AMF
gang, estimated to have caused £70,000 worth of damage to the rail network
in South London, when he said: “Each of you are talented artists, in terms
of graffiti artists. So to have to see the six of you sitting in the dock of
this court about to be sentenced is quite appalling.” Lazarides read about
that case, too. “In fact, I went back and re-read it just to make sure that
I hadn’t got it wrong. There was a perceptible change in the headlines: the
one I read called them ‘artists’, not ‘vandals’. And it sounded like the
judge agreed.”
Not that Judge Gledhill is a complete convert: the AMF crew members were given
sentences of between 16 months and eight months in prison.
Lazarides’s future plans include an exhibition of political posters. He has
been busy pulling together a collection that includes pieces drawn by the
Parisian students who revolted in May 1968, the striking miners of the 1980s
and the Black Panthers.
It’s this political work, he says, that’s “particularly close to my heart”. As
we look through some of the pieces, and play join-the-dots to the
contemporary artists who bear their influence, Lazarides gets more and more
enthused. “Look at those!” he says, waving at a particularly wonderful set
of French prints bought via the Mai 68 show at the Hayward Gallery
last year. “Just look at them!” Later, showing me an (amazing) film of JR’s
work in Liberia, he bangs his desk with glee. Yes, Lazarides is making good
money out of this art, but he loves it, too.
This partially explains his latest plot to have his “outsider” artists
accorded the ultimate “insider” artists’ accolade: commissions to create
permanent works of municipally sanctioned public art.
“Why should public art be chosen by committee? Why can’t you have artists who
are truly popular and populist in these public spaces? I think, maybe, that
this is our time.”
Scratching the Surface, featuring Vhils aka Alexandre Farto, 11
Rathbone Place, London W1, 020-7636 5443, until August 1, free admission
Banksy’s heirs: five rising stars of graffiti
BLU This artist, who is from Bologna, has been hitting walls with his
twisted vistas since about 2000. Track down his work via blublu.org,
or join nearly five million others to marvel at his brilliant seven-minute
animation, Muto, on YouTube (tinyurl.
com/blumoto). Then scoff at his BBC imitators (tinyurl.com/bluhoo)
JR — he’s French, possibly of Tunisian heritage — found fame by pasting
huge portraits of Parisian banlieue dwellers across the capital
(tinyurl.com/ jrtimes) and has progressed to the bidonvilles of Liberia and
favelas of Brazil (tinyurl.com/ jrtimes2). Learn more at jr-art.net
SCHEME “Graffiti-active since 2004”, Scheme is a 20-year-old Muscovite
with a particular yen for typography and Neo-Futurist fonts. See stylekon
struktor.com
SWOON Taken on by the Deitch gallery — which first brought graffiti to
the Venice Biennale — the art-student-turned-street-artist Swoon makes
beautiful, lifelike paper portraits, pastes them on to walls and lets them
fade and peel away: tinyurl.com/ timesswoon
VHILS Alexandre Farto (vhils.com), 22, makes pictures in walls, not on
them. He carves, burns, chisels or etches his portraits into masonry and
wood, using the textures below the surface as his medium. Vhils appeared on
the front page of The Times in a report on the Cans Festival 2008
