For a while, Toasters have been painting clever grey silhouetted tags as part of their Bluff Buff series. The tags aren’t likely to be removed themselves because they actually look like the grey blobs of paint that graffiti removal squads put up. Kind of like ESPO’s roll gates. Now, Toasters have changed things a bit to make the work slightly more obvious. Here are some pictures of their new Arrow Bluff Buff pieces:
Photos by Toasters
The nice thing about street art is that, for 99% of the people who look at it (the people who see it on the street and not on blogs like this one), there’s not market consideration about “how much is that worth?” or anything like that. But then there’s the 1% of us (the people who follow blogs and write and forums and so on) who do see the art market side of street art. Sometimes the art market provides opportunities for Boxi, Steve Powers and other artists can show up in London and paint walls with permission and free paint. Other times, the art market makes me want to cry.
This week, Philips de Pury had a few pieces in their London day auction by low-brow and street artists. Street Art Is Dead notes that two Mr. Brainwash pieces sold for £42,000 and £75,000 even though the estimates were already a seemingly insane £7-9,000 and £15-20,000 respectively. What makes those results even more disgusting is when you compare them to other results in that same sale:
Similarly, while it doesn’t outrage me quite as much, I don’t exactly understand why this Banksy sold for $75,000. It’s just not a strong image.
The art market makes no sense and sometimes I wish it would just go away.
Photo courtesy of Phillips de Pury
It’s been a crazy week in London. Moniker and all that. But here’s what has been going on with street art elsewhere:
Photo by unusualimage
Yes I know, another thing about Moniker. But this needs to be mentioned. Very Nearly Almost issue 13 is launching on Friday night at the Moniker Art Fair from 7-9pm. As always, this issue sounds awesome: Eine, Elbow-toe, Miso, ESPO, Dan Witz…
There’s a reason that VNA are my favorite art magazine. Besides great content, they always try to do something a bit special with their launches. This time around, the special edition of the magazine comes with an Eine screenprinted cover, a VNA/Eine fridge magnet and stickers from a bunch of the artists in the magazine. This special edition is limited to 100 copies and they will be available on Friday night, so RSVP to rsvp@verynearlyalmost.com and get there early.
And here’s a video teaser for the issue:
VNA issue 13 from Make Some Tea on Vimeo.
Photos courtesy of Very Nearly Almost
As promised in Tuesday’s post, here’s more from the set up process at Moniker Art Fair. Unfortunately I had to stay home on Wednesday, but I was out taking photos on Tuesday and of course plenty of other people like Hooked Blog were out taking photos.
Speaking of Faith47, check out her new mural in South Africa on Wooster Collective.
And there are some Moniker videos to mention as well. The folks from Babelgum have been working non-stop doing editing at the fair. Here’s their time-lapse of Eine’s mural:
Calculate isn’t really for me and I’ve heard more than one person suggest that Eine should have repainted his Vandalism image which was on this same wall, but Eine fans seem to be liking this new piece as well.
S.Butterfly made this video interview with Steve Powers:
All in all, Moniker is shaping up to be everything that I and it seems everybody else have been hoping for. The fair opens on Thursday night from 7-9 and I’ll be running tours of the fair on Friday at 11:30 and 1:30, so I hope to see as many people there as possible.
Photos by RJ, unusualimage, nolionsinengland and Hooked
While Brad Downey, one of my favorite street artists, was at BLK River recently, he tried an experiment in graffiti removal for an artwork called Searching for Something Concrete. While at first look it’s not my favorite piece from Brad, he always keeps things interesting and his art always seems to grow on me over a period of weeks. Here’s a video of the artwork:
Last week I posted some photos of what David Choe and DVS had painted in London for the Hell’s Half Acre show. Here’s some more from that recent London visit, one wall on Leake Street and another in the Old Vic Tunnels off of Leake Street:
David is interviewed in this next video, so of course it’s NSFW:
Hell’s Half Acre opened on Monday night and Graffoto has a review.
This week, Eelus and other street artists are off to Gambia to for Wide Open Walls, a street art project that Eelus has curated there. I can’t wait to see what they paint. The lineup is very exciting: Eelus, Logan Hicks, Broken Crow, Lucy McLachlan, Ben Eine, Xenz and Mysterious Al. The aims behind the project art pretty clever. Eelus and the rest of the Wide Open Walls artists are trying to increase tourism to Gambia with their artwork. Like how FAME Festival and Nuart have brought tourists to places they wouldn’t have otherwise visited, this project has the potential to bring money to an area that could really use it. You can learn more about Wide Open Walls here.
Originally, I had planned to interview Eelus about the project, but then Juxtapoz and Zeitgeist each interviewed him, so I figured I probably didn’t have much to ask that hadn’t already been asked.
Village Underground is where it’s at this week. The Shoreditch warehouse off of Great Eastern Street is host to Moniker Art Fair. Hookedblog has a much better description of the fair than what I could throw together right now, but the fair opens Thursday night and it’s going to be a highlight of the street art calendar in London this year. Big names from around the world have are taking part in this fair and there’s lots of great art to see and fun events planned (including some tours led by me on Friday afternoon at 11:30 and 1:30). I’m on my way out the door to go see how the set up is going today, but here are some photos that I took yesterday as things were getting set up:
Expect more photos tonight or tomorrow and hope to see people there on Thursday…
Recently I’ve been loving Isaac Cordal‘s Cement Eclipses series. These tiny little sculptures are just the sort of thing that embody what street art is about. Cordal’s sculptures are like little magical gifts to the public that some people will see and love but so many more will ignore. I’m in London right now, which is where he’s been putting these sculptures up, so I’ll be on the look out for some.
Photos by unusualimage and Isaac Cordal
