The Financial Times’s profile of Steve Lazarides sets the way back machine to 2007 and the height of the street art boom. Lazarides and Banksy have parted ways but the dealer is still reinvesting in his business and says Hollywood still has money even if the bankers don’t. That doesn’t mean he’s all nostalgic for the near past:
It wasn’t just Banksy: there was a host of names who would sell out within minutes on the websites of publishers such as Pictures on Walls and Black Rat Press – Adam Neate, Anthony Micallef, Blek Le Rat, Dface, Faile, Nick Walker and Shepard Fairey and dozens of others – only to pop up on Ebay auctions moments later at much higher prices. And when the London auction house Bonhams held its first sale of urban art works in early 2008, the already inflated prices went through the roof. The auction, which consisted largely of prints, raised in excess of £1.2m, with an original work by Banksy, appropriately titled “Laugh Now”, fetching the highest price of the evening at £228,000.
Urban Renewal (Financial Times)
