PARIS: It was an unlikely juxtaposition: A green, graffitied face of the Mona Lisa staring out from the eminently respectable cover of a Sotheby's auction catalogue.
Yet even stranger were the auction results of the Contemporary Art sale at Sotheby's London Olympia last month. As stalwarts of the contemporary art's scene - Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers, Cindy Sherman - nestled around their estimates, it was the works of "Banksy," a shadowy British graffiti artist, that set the sale alight. The artist's "Mona Lisa," spray-painted with stencil on canvas, set the auction's top sale at £57,600, or $109,600, closely followed by six Warholesque silkscreen prints of Kate Moss, which sold for more than five times their estimate. Banksy has "underlined his credentials as a heavyweight in the art world," wrote Matthew Beard in The Independent. Graffiti blogs agreed that Banksy had been given the "green light" by the art establishment.
» LaPanse.com / IHT
