Loïc Gouzer doesn’t think the art world understands Banksy. In fact, he thinks it’s scared of him.
On May 20, Gouzer’s auction platform Fair Warning will sell Girl and Balloon on Found Landscape, a painting from Banksy’s “Crude Oils” series, in an invitation-only live auction staged inside Tiffany & Co.’s Fifth Avenue flagship. The work, which modifies a thrifted landscape painting with the artist’s signature red, heart-shaped balloon drifting away from a young girl, carries a $13 to $18 million estimate and will be on view to the public in the store ahead of the sale.
For Gouzer, the setting is part stunt, part argument. A street artist in a luxury temple. A controlled, almost private sale wrapped in spectacle. And, as he freely admits, a bit of fun. But the real point is Banksy himself. “I think he’s the most consequential artist of our time,” Gouzer said. “Whether we like him or not.”
That claim sounds bombastic when much of the art world sees the headline grabbing Banksy as a guilty pleasure at best. Gouzer leans into that discomfort. He argues that Banksy occupies a position few artists ever have: total independence from the system that usually confers legitimacy. “The art world has a problem with him,” Gouzer said in a phone interview. “He’s the only artist that really succeeded as an outsider. He’s not made by the art world, and they don’t control him.”
For Gouzer, the closest comparison is Jean-Michel Basquiat. Not stylistically, but structurally. Basquiat, he said, was dismissed by the establishment early on, leaving museums and boards slow to collect and even slower to recognize what they were missing.
History, and the market, caught up fast. In 2017, Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), a skull-like figure painted at the height of his early rise, sold at Sotheby’s New York for $110.5 million, far exceeding its $60 million estimate and placing the artist firmly among the market’s most expensive names. The buyer, Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa, later lent the painting to exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Seattle Art Museum, and it appeared in a major survey at the Brant Foundation in 2019.
Gouzer sees that arc as instructive, and unfinished when it comes to Banksy. “There’s no major state museum that would have the balls of showing a Banksy,” he said. “They’ll regret it.” When those shows do happen, he added, they will come for the wrong reasons. “They’ll do it because the crowds want to see it,” he said, “not because they understood it.”
His conviction extends to the market. Gouzer has been saying for years that Banksy could become a $100 million artist. He’s not backing off those claims. “I said Basquiat would get there in our lifetime, and he did,” he said. “I think Banksy will too.”
The sale itself is just the third time Fair Warning has staged a live auction. For a work like this, he said, it made sense to gather collectors in a room, even if he’s spent years trying to strip auctions of their usual theatrics.
When asked how this approach compares to Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s recent push into the private auction format with LGD Hammer, which later this month is selling Willem de Kooning’s Milkmaid (1984) with an estimate of $10 to $15 million, Gouzer didn’t hesitate. “That de Kooning is a very nice work, but it’s extremely generic,” he said. “As bourgeois as it gets.” Banksy, in Gouzer’s telling, sits at the opposite end of that spectrum. Which is exactly why he wants to sell it now.