From the Train Yard to the Auction House: Connecting the Graffiti Subculture to the Art Market

Studying Cultural Intermediaries through a Subculture Commodification and Art Market Transformations

Various scholars have long shown that graffiti writing can lead to jail or prison, but also to galleries and museums (Ferrell, 2016). Among the increasing number of surveys on graffiti writers (Ross et al., 2017), they focus as much on the criminalization as on its commodification of their subculture. Analysing the meeting between the art world and New York graffiti subculture in the 1980s, Lachmann insisted on the staging of their social distance by gallerists and journalists (1988). This was facilitated by the mainstream media’s treatment of graffiti writing as a form of youth delinquency and moral panic factor (Austin, 2001). However, entrenched stereotypes such as the association of graffiti with adolescence (Macdonald, 2001) have been challenged. Henceforth, scholars stress conversion strategies toward legal muralism for private or public institutions (Kramer, 2017) or para-artistic activities such as graphic design, favoured by commercial uses of graffiti in advertising or the fashion industry (Kimvall, 2014). Sociological works also stress how the practice of graffiti includes many activities additional to writing on walls or trains, focusing on narratives and myths constructed around tags, which materialize in editorial supports (Jacobson, 2020). Actually, the worldwide diffusion of subcultural communications (Thornton, 1995), such as fanzines and videos, has played a crucial role in the globalization of the graffiti subculture (Snyder, 2009). The emergence of international graffiti stars was reinforced by their mediatization through social networks (Hannerz, 2016). At the same time, street art has evolved into a globalized (Bengsten, 2014) and incompletely commodified practice (Molnàr, 2018). Often contrasted with graffiti writing, street art involves more varied means for graphic intervention in the public space and seeks a wider audience (Molnàr, 2017). However, the prominent figures of both graffiti and street art are part of a common legitimization process, sometimes implicating the same cultural intermediaries. The latter remain little studied, although their activities determine the evolution of graffiti writers or street artists’ subcultural practices, even if they are not necessarily ‘freezing’ in commodification (Hebdige, 1979). Regardless, the way that globalization and reinforced heteronomy of graffiti writing were facilitated by information and communication technologies and cultural intermediaries is insufficient to explain the success in the art market of some by-products, whose prices reached unexpected heights in auction houses, rather than in art galleries, from the mid-2000s.

This case study on the commercialization of graffiti artworks also extends sociological work on the role of cultural intermediaries in recent changes in the contemporary art market, shaped by a globalization process and the decline of boundaries between highbrow and popular culture (Crane, 2009). Globalization implies an increased circulation of artists and their productions, but also of collectors and cultural intermediaries (Schultheis et al., 2016; Velthuis and Brandallero, 2018). In art-trade hubs such as New York, London or Paris, this process reinforces the position of major auction houses with respect to art galleries. In France, legal changes in July 2000 benefited the international auction houses – Sotheby’s, Christie’s and their Parisian branches (Quemin, 2001) – but also their local competitors established on historic sites such as the Hôtel Drouot, which were the first to take a position on graffiti art. While they benefited from the long-term work of pioneer gallerists, collectors and public officials, auctioneers are now indicating the trend to be followed by museal institutions, even if their exhibition still strengthens the exposed artists’ ratings (Moulin, 1994). Auctioneers also outdo the gallerists in the process of marketing graffiti artworks, despite the attempts of the latter to install moral boundaries between artists and the auction circuit by presenting themselves as the ‘promoters’ of artistic value, in contrast with auctioneers who would be only interested in economic value (Velthuis, 2005). Beyond the case of graffiti, this change in the balance of power between galleries and auction houses increases the valuation effects specific to the secondary art market, which are now all the more decisive for artists’ ratings as the results are immediately available online (Pardo-Guerra, 2011). Graffiti writers also use digital tools and social networks to promote their own artworks and image with less reliance on intermediaries (Molnàr, 2018). Nevertheless, they can hardly do without them to gain access to the art market strongholds such as the main auction houses.

Artistic consecration is a series of steps, which vary according to the artists’ network, including intermediaries who represent them on the art market. Gallerists and auctioneers play an ever more crucial role in establishing a system of valuation for emerging art categories (Khaire and Wadhwani, 2010). Indeed, they provide buyers of ‘singular goods’, such as graffiti canvases, the information and knowledge to allow them to make reasonable choices (Karpik: 2010). Besides, the dynamic process of legitimation of ‘self-taught art’ (Fine, 2004) shows that even if they are celebrated for their lack of artistic training or their position on the fringes of society, ‘outsider artists’ participate in existing art world networks, in which the intermediaries who promote them seek to create or strengthen their own position. My case study extends these results by distinguishing insiders and outsiders among cultural intermediaries. Indeed, bridging a gap between the contemporary art market and the graffiti subculture, which they also contribute to perform, implicates ‘a mix of engineering skills’ (McFall, 2014), the distribution of which needs to be investigated. Music industry studies shed light on the division of labour between intermediaries, whose ‘cultural’ activity is not always immediately recognized as such (Negus, 2002). The case of the emerging country music scene shows how some intermediaries focus on selecting new talent, while others aim at fabricating the authenticity of the artists (Peterson, 1997). Graffiti involves similar roles and strategies to commercialize and increase artworks’ value. Providing a functional typology of intermediaries enables us, therefore, to locate them within a division of labour based on the specificity of their resources (Lizé, 2016). Following this track to study the margin of the contemporary art market coincides with Heinich’s proposal for ‘mapping the various categories of persons, institutions, gestures, objects owing to which a piece of scrap may be offered the career of an authentic art work’ (2012: 695). The case of graffiti art seems particularly relevant: beyond their diversity, the cultural intermediaries involved all play with the boundaries between art and non-art, but also with legality, which corresponds to basic forms of transgression as a major paradigm of contemporary art (Heinich, 2014).

Data and Methods

This article is based on a mixed methods research design, spanning both time – from the early 1970s to the mid-2010s – and geographical and social space – from the New York graffiti pioneers to the auctions of their artworks in Paris’ wealthiest districts. The analysis of the first attempts to introduce graffiti artworks into the art market in the USA, going up to the first thematic auction in France in the mid-2000s, was based on documentary sources (newspapers and art press, graffiti fanzines, exhibition catalogues) and interviews with graffiti artists, gallerists and collectors. In addition, I conducted a field survey on a series of 13 thematic auctions in France between October 2006 and March 2017. Ten of these auctions took place in Paris, which is a central location for graffiti writers and the contemporary art trade, but also three in smaller cities: Lyon, Marseille and Strasbourg. I collected these thematic auctions’ catalogues, as a heterogeneous space ‘in which academic knowledge, photographic techniques, visual aesthetic criteria, historicity, and provenance are all used in the construction of market values’ (Geismar, 2001: 35). This enabled me both to objectify the graffiti artworks selection and the study of the anticipation of their reception. I also took into account the estimates of the auctioned artworks and their sales results, systematically recorded on the artprice.com website, as well as the transaction history of the highest-rated graffiti artists. Moreover, I found a network of 27 graffiti art intermediaries who took part in the organization of one or more of these thematic sales. This population included both auctioneers, the ‘experts’ – mentioned as such in the thematic auction catalogues – and the collectors who buy or resell these graffiti artworks.

According to the situations observed and the interlocutors, I put forward either my academic status or that of an insider (Becker, 1963) as a recognized graffiti writer, even if I was not directly involved into any transaction. I was, therefore, able to rely on data generated from participant observation, taking advantage of my relationships with several graffiti writers whose artworks are sold on the auction circuit. This allowed me to analyse the environment observed based on ongoing discussions, without presenting myself as a researcher. This was particularly the case during the vernissages of the auctions, as I was able to attend the preparations for two of these with some exposed graffiti writers. This closeness helped me to take a look behind the scenes of the auctions and to account for the relationships between artists, intermediaries and collectors. I completed my investigation with in-depth interviews with auctioneers or collectors in their workplaces, to whom I was rather asserting my academic position. This ethnographic research design provided me with a better understanding of the various cultural intermediaries’ practices, while identifying their social trajectories and mutual relationships.

From the Bronx to the Champs-Élysées: Three Cycles of Intermediation

A market for graffiti art emerged in New York in the early 1970s, but the increasing results of the auctions held in France from the mid-2000s indicate greater inter-subjective agreement about valuation over time (Khaire and Wadhwani, 2010). A diachronic approach emphasizes the role of cultural intermediaries in this transnational process of consolidating such a category towards commercial success. Three distinct phases of intermediation are distinguished: ¹ the first two ended in commercial and critical failure in galleries and then in museums. While the third phase resulted in a consecration of graffiti artworks in auction houses, now followed by museums.

The first attempt to connect teenagers painting their pseudonyms on the subway to the art market took place only a few years after the appearance of graffiti as a cultural practice. In 1972, Hugo Martinez, a sociology student at New York City College, initiated the creation of United Graffiti Artists (UGA). This informal group encouraged the gathering of an ‘elite’ of graffiti writers to produce canvases (Martinez and Zaya, 2006). To ensure an economic outlet, Martinez made contact with the small and independent Razor Gallery, where he organized an exhibition in 1973. He became the spokesperson of graffiti writers to the media, through which they gained visibility, thus raising their vocational horizons beyond New York. However, the sales of the canvases hardly exceeded a few hundred dollars, and the exhibition got the attention of mainstream media, rather than that of art critics. Graffiti writing attracted increasing interest from some outlying art dealers from the early 1980s. These were European, like a Roman gallerist, administrator of the Chirico Foundation, or newcomers to the contemporary art market, such as Patti Astor, a New York actress and performer. To acquire graffiti artworks, gallerists were henceforth looking for intermediaries, rather than seeking out new talent by themselves (Lachmann, 1988). Even more than Hugo Martinez, Fab 5 Freddy is the archetype of a cultural intermediary, whose cultural heritage allowed him to link graffiti writers with the art world: his godfather was one of the founders of modern jazz and he was related to Jean-Michel Basquiat, who has helped graffiti writers to gain their first acceptance in a museum. In 1981, the New York Wave exhibition at PS1, annex of the Modern Art Museum, associated second-generation graffiti writers with Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Harring, who belonged to an already recognized avant-garde. The gallerist Sidney Janis, who played a major role in the success of abstract expressionism in the 1960s, became strongly involved in this legitimization process. This is also the case for Jeffrey Deitch, who was at the time in charge of Citibank’s artistic investments. Nevertheless, it was of more benefit to the avant-garde artists whose urbanity was demonstrated by this association with subway-car painters. While cultural intermediaries encouraged graffiti writers to refer to legitimate art streams such as Pop Art or Action Painting, these efforts still fell short of achieving success. Art critics remained condescending, and prices collapsed following the failure of the Post-Graffiti exhibition at Sidney Janis’ Gallery in 1983. The gallery owner kept a large stock of the unsold items. While the enthusiasm of US contemporary art buyers continued to wane, policies of graffiti removal and repression, as well as growing crime on the streets of New York, complicated writers’ activities. Graffiti artworks would, however, find new commercial outlets on the other side of the Atlantic.

A second cycle of intermediation began in Europe in the early 1980s, as a graffiti scene emerged in Western Europe. New intermediaries then created the conditions for a European market for graffiti canvases to be born. Indeed, many paintings that were sold in New York galleries had been bought by European collectors of contemporary art, such as the historian Henk Pijnenburg, coming from a family of Flemish jewellers. In 1983, Pijnenburg organized a retrospective of New York graffiti pioneers at the Boyman Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. During the same period, avant-garde journalists imported hip-hop culture into France, graffiti writing being part of the package with rap music, breakdance and deejaying (Hammou, 2016). The book Subway Art (Chalfant and Cooper, 1984) was a big commercial success, contributing to the dissemination of graffiti in Europe, as well as to the later legitimization of artworks by the writers who appeared in it. A sequel, Spraycan Art (Chalfant and Prigoff, 1987), focused on the emerging graffiti scene outside New York, especially in Europe. This aestheticizing treatment had a smaller audience than mainstream journalistic reports, which mainly dealt with the ‘tag phenomenon’ in terms of juvenile delinquency in France (Vulbeau, 1992) as in the USA (Austin, 2001). Therefore, it facilitated the identification of a graffiti writers’ elite by a new type of cultural intermediaries. Belonging to the ‘modernist’ faction of the cultural administration, they were eager to both support popular cultural forms and to follow the latest international trends (Dubois and Laborier, 2003). Organizer of an exhibition at the Groningen Museum in 1991, Pinjenburg spoke as an administrator of the Dutch government agency for contemporary art, describing the graffiti writers whose works he collected as more ‘authentically artists’ than professional visual artists ‘who know too much about art and look like civil servants’ (Hoekstra, 1992: 15). He found counterparts in France among high officials of the Ministry of Culture, who also organized exhibitions in Paris. This attempt at public legitimation was, however, a failure (Dubois and Laborier, 2003). Until 1994, the Regional Contemporary Art Fund of Ile-de-France acquired French graffiti artworks and canvases by New York graffiti pioneers. Nevertheless, the exhibition ‘Graffiti Art: Artistes américains et français, 1981–1991’ at the Musée National des Monuments Français faced hostility from art critics, despite the association of graffiti writers with neo-expressionist painters such as Basquiat or Harring, who were already dead and world-famous. French and New York pioneers – JonOne settled in Paris in 1987 to start a second career in the art world – were also not considered sufficiently innovative to benefit from public grants. As 10 years earlier in New York, they were supported by young gallery owners or personalities from the fashion industry. They filled a niche left free by more established actors of the art market, and this financial support maintained a commercial outlet for graffiti writers wishing to professionalize as visual artists. Although they remained on the margins of the art market, this support made a reinvestment in graffiti artworks possible at the turn of the 2000s.

The third cycle of intermediation started in the 2000s with the success of Banksy in London’s auction houses. The British artist played a similar role to Basquiat or Harring in the 1980s in a cross-legitimization process between graffiti writers and contemporary artists whose work had a significant urban dimension. The acceptance of this British artist served as a signal for Artcurial, the leading French auction house. Artcurial started to organize thematic sales, despite the failure of a previous attempt six years earlier at Guernsey’s in New York, during which the bidding for graffiti artists’ canvases got much lower prices than for street furniture covered with Basquiat or Harring signatures. In June 2006, the opportunity arose to sell New York pioneers’ paintings from Pinjenburg’s collection, to which were added recent European productions. The latter were less successful than older artworks, such as a canvas painted by JonOne in 1993 bought for 24,800 euros by an American collector. Actually, many of JonOne productions had already changed hands for sums indicating their credibility on the aesthetic level (Velthuis, 2005). Following the success of this first thematic sale, other major French auction houses stepped in. Then, a classic process was triggered: artwork consecration on the contemporary art market led to their public legitimization by a museum institution, which increased the artists’ rating (Moulin, 1994). In August 2008, the ‘Street Art’ exhibition at the Tate Modern Gallery in London was the first step of this double movement: six international artists ‘whose work is intricately linked to the urban environment’ (Tate Modern, 2008) painted the façade of the building. Six months later, the TAG exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris took the second step, focusing on graffiti writing. Illegality and gratuitousness were staged as marks of authenticity by Alain-Dominique Di Gallizia, the exhibition organizer. This renowned architect, specialized in celebrity mansions, proclaimed to the mainstream media that ‘graffiti art is a breath of fresh air in a financialized contemporary art market’ (L’Express, 2011).The interviewed partner of Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr – a famous Parisian auctioneer – adopted a similar position referring to the planning of a thematic sale at the Hôtel Drouot in April 2012: ‘this movement offers the art market the new blood it needs, a bit like pop art did in the 1960s’ (Consultant for Millon and Cornette de Saint-Cyr auction houses). This illustrates how denouncing the institutionalization of contemporary art favours access to museums (Schultheis et al., 2016) but also to the secondary art market. Di Gallizia had opened his architect studio to graffiti writers for artistic experimentation from 2004. Having contracted a communication agency to generate media coverage of the TAG exhibition, he gave many interviews to present his collection to the art press. Unlike in the early 1990s, the exhibition incited enthusiasm from the latter and was also a public success, with more than 80,000 visitors in three weeks. It was followed by the exhibition ‘Né dans la rue’ at the Foundation Cartier in June 2010. This contemporary art institution largely broke its attendance records (around 230,000 visitors in six months). The exhibition ‘Arts in the Streets’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, took place only two months later, after the aforementioned Jeffrey Deitch became its director. These museum events pushed up the ratings of the graffiti writers whose artworks were sold at the first thematic auctions, now concentrated in Paris. Their organization continued at a steady pace, up to eight per year in 2017. However, the major focus for journalists and art critics was still on those who selected graffiti artworks and transformed them into good financial investments, rather than on the graffiti writers themselves.

During these three distinct phases, graffiti art intermediaries had been accumulating economic and symbolic profits, and a division of labour had set in. Focusing on this third period enables us to grasp the multiplicity and complementarity of their roles in the actual production and valuation of graffiti artworks.

The Complementary Roles and Resources of Graffiti Art Intermediaries

Graffiti art auctions appear to be meeting places for different types of intermediaries with specific trajectories and complementary roles and resources. First, commissioned experts from the graffiti subculture select writers that they encourage to produce marketable works, and sometimes influence their aesthetic choices. Second, newcomers appear from para-artistic fields, seeking to create a niche in the contemporary art market. These entrepreneurs contribute to the demand for graffiti artworks by promoting a flattering image of their collectors. Third, some established actors of contemporary art, here experienced auctioneers, are willing to extend their activities. They influence the reception of graffiti artworks by art buyers, packaging graffiti artworks and mobilizing influential art buyers ahead of the auctions.

The Experts: Selecting Marketable Graffiti Writers and Directing their Artwork

Essential activities in the organization of graffiti auctions are delegated to ‘experts’, generally the youngest among the different types of intermediaries and the socially closest to the graffiti writers. Their main function is to choose which ones should be encouraged to produce artworks on marketable supports. In addition to their crucial role in selecting artists, they often intervene in their creative process. In doing so, they have to manage the social distance between graffiti writers and other intermediaries who are closer to their potential clients. It is as if this social distance would reinforce the need for selection, and thus for expert. This is illustrated by a provocative assertion from Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr. It sounds like the French Minister of Culture Jack Lang 20 years earlier, distinguishing the ‘good’ graffiti, which have their place in a museum, from the ‘bad’ graffiti that are only acts of vandalism (Dubois and Laborier, 2003): ‘The selection must be extremely rigorous because 99% of the taggers are idiots who only think about getting drugs and defacing walls’ (Le Point, 2009).

Furthermore, graffiti experts gladly nurture this social distance so that they may benefit from it. This is the case of a former graffiti writer and manager of a Parisian spray paint shop, who has collaborated as an expert with the auction house Millon and Cornette de Saint-Cyr since 2009 (see Figure 1). Qualified as a computer technician, he maximized the referencing of his spray paint shop’s website, which appeared at the top of google search results for ‘French graffiti’. This explains why he was approached by a partner of Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, looking for French graffiti writers recognized by their peers, but whose marketable productions were still unreleased. This illustrates the need to consider the pivotal role of cultural intermediaries whose activities do not fit into a narrow and reductionist aesthetic definition of culture (Negus, 2002). In a joint interview with a Parisian graffiti pioneer whose artworks he has selected for auctions, the expert draws a metaphor for this social distance by comparing their skinheads with the long grey hair of the auctioneer. He then details the added value of his brokerage activity, insisting on his underprivileged social origin and his subcultural capital (Thornton, 1995). Criticizing the gallerists’ and auctioneers’ lack of knowledge of the graffiti world, this expert highlights ‘their street credibility’, a popular idiom from the rap world which characterizes here the authenticity of their expertise and that of the graffiti writers they promote. Thus, graffiti experts play a comparable role to the ‘scouts’ involved in recognition work in the fashion industry or football. Honing expertise to identify raw skills in remote locations, they are engaged in the bridging of social distances by building ties with potential exchange partners (Darr and Mears, 2017).

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Figure 1.

Catalogue cover of the Graffiti Street Art Auction, Millon & Cornette de Saint Cyr, Paris (reproduced with kind permission from Millon & Associés).

‘Kings’ or graffiti writers that ‘everyone in the graffiti world knows’ (Expert for Millon and Cornette de Saint-Cyr) are thus convinced by intermediaries from their entourage to produce canvases, even if they have never done this before. Some of these writers readily admit that they would not have thought about it otherwise. This is the case of Parisian metro painters who started their graffiti career at the end of the 1980s. Babs insists that he would never have imagined he would exhibit or sell canvases in galleries before being contacted for an Artcurial auction (Paristonkar, 2012). The aforementioned expert also claims that he ‘helps some graffiti writers he appreciates to pay their fines’ by encouraging them to produce canvases for the art market. According to his presentation in the catalogue of the Aguttes auction in 2012, the graffiti writer See has been dedicated to canvases and other paintings since 2009, because ‘he had to put aside the vandal graffiti . . . after two arrests including one with incarceration’ (Aguttes, 2012). The experts refract specific issues of the graffiti subculture in their selection work, but also in the estimation of starting prices at auctions. Except for rare artworks whose value has already been authenticated in previous transactions, they are the first to define the commercial potential of graffiti writers. Being themselves newcomers to the art market, these experts assess the success of their intermediation based on selling prices, especially when these exceed the initial estimates. Referring to the case of Bando, commonly regarded as the first European graffiti writer and a major actor of the graffiti subculture, an interviewed expert explains that his role is often to decide on the price for artworks ‘who do not exist on the market’ and thus define the rating of graffiti writers he promotes. At the 2009 auction in Drouot, the expert therefore set the base price at 15,000 euros for the first Bando canvas for sale. This amount was considered quite high by the consultant for Millon and Cornette de Saint-Cyr who had recruited this expert, but the canvas ended up selling for more than 22,000 euros. Graffiti artwork valuation thus appears to result from a hybridization of criteria from graffiti subculture with contemporary art dealers’ representation of potential demand.

Furthermore, graffiti experts encourage the integration of art market schemes into the creative process of graffiti writers, especially when they are adjusted to their dispositions. Nasty, a Parisian pioneer who made a career in advertising, willingly plays with the functionality of his artworks’ support. Indeed, contextualization and transgression are typical of a contemporary artist’s approach (Heinich, 2014), which is valorized in Nasty’s case by a young gallerist acting as an expert in a thematic sale in 2009. Referring to the stolen subway station plates, which Nasty had then covered with his stylized signature, this expert told me that he was waiting for RATP ² to pursue the French graffiti writer, so that ‘it would make people talk about his creations’. It is, however, difficult to promote graffiti writers who have never marketed their activity and whose social condition is rooted in the working class. Recognition by peers is not enough for graffiti writers to attain success in the art world. This is underlined by one former graffiti writer, who headed the editorial staff of specialized magazines in the early 2000s. After having converted to being an artists’ agent, he became involved in the selection of French artworks for Artcurial sales in 2010 and 2012. He points out that he explicitly – but unsuccessfully – asked some of their authors to ‘show that they are capable of doing something else on canvas than reproducing what they do in the street or on trains . . . and to talk about it to potential clients’ (Expert for Arcurial no. 1). Moreover, these experts sometimes have to manage hysteresis effects (Bourdieu, 1984) among renowned graffiti writers whose limited success in the art market causes frustration and deviant behaviour:

I had to box the ears of one guy from the most hardcore graffiti crew, you know who I mean . . . because he was out of order and threatened an employee of the auction house . . . they went to the office with canvases in the car, opened the trunk and said ‘you sell that’, he [the employee] ran off and they chased him with a knife! I told him that he should never do that again, not good for business [smiling]. (Expert for Millon and Cornette de Saint-Cyr)

Another expert, who has worked on Artcurial auctions since 2007, is a young graduate in art history who combines a job in an antique shop with the management of an associative gallery, specializing in graffiti art. She insists on her role of professional socialization for graffiti writers eager to pursue a career in the art world without having followed an arts curriculum.

I made the effort to learn your rules, learn mine! A young artist who’s studied the Fine Arts knows what a consignment contract is. Some [graffiti writers] tell you that they don’t care, that they’ll go get their canvas from the guy’s place and smash his mouth, but they are the first to get ripped off. A consignment contract is simple as fuck, but you have to know have to talk to them, that’s all! (Expert for Artcurial no. 2)

Young experts also contribute to their own professionalization by accompanying graffiti writers in their transformation into artist, that is to say into individual entrepreneurs of their work, their career and themselves (Menger, 2014). For instance, another interviewed expert informs graffiti writers about how the Artprice website functions and exhorts them to ‘work on their rating’. However, it is less a matter of imposing money as the ultimate measure of artistic value (Velthuis, 2005) in the graffiti subculture, than a contribution to the artistic professionalization of some of its major actors. Mastering valuation and marketing techniques favours both graffiti writers willing to become established visual artists and the experts who promote them. Nevertheless, graffiti experts’ sales-based commissions remain much lower than those of the main auction shareholders.

The Entrepreneurs: Creating a Flattering Portrait of the Demand

The second type of graffiti art intermediary is that of the ‘entrepreneurs’ from para-artistic fields such as the fashion industry or architecture. They invest in an expanding niche market, which their counterparts in previous intermediation cycles have largely contributed to create. Like graffiti writers, they want to make a name for themselves on the art market. Unlike the experts describedearlier, entrepreneurs are socially distant from the graffiti writers they promote, although they sometimes stage friendly relationships, playing on their ambivalence. Yet, they are also outsiders of the art market. Their intermediation activity is also different from that of the auctioneers. They play a specific role with potential buyers of graffiti artworks, of which they are also often important collectors. The case of graffiti art thus illustrates how the success of valorization of an artistic genre implies the valorization of its collectors. Regarding the contemporary art market, a high price may indicate not only the quality of an artwork but also the identity of collectors who bought works before an artist’s reputation was established (Velthuis, 2005). It is, therefore, to enhance the value of graffiti artworks that entrepreneurs paint a flattering picture of an ‘elite of collectors’, to which they are happy to show they belong. However, their representation appears both idealized – emphasizing aesthetic rather than financial considerations – and stratified.

This is the case for the consultant for Millon and Cornette de Saint-Cyr auction houses, who recruited several experts from the graffiti world. Specializing in luxury residential real estate, he presents himself as a specialist in ‘emerging markets’, who became involved in the organization of thematic auctions from the mid-2000s, not only of graffiti art but also of comic strips. One of the experts that he recruited presents him to me as ‘a high roller who drives a Porsche with a big watch on his wrist’ but also a ‘very well-organized [person] . . . from whom he learned a lot about the workings of auctions and the art market’. In a joint interview in the leading French weekly magazine for contemporary art professionals, another expert explains the selection of the graffiti artists on display, while the entrepreneur that he recruited addresses questions about collectors. He first sketches the portrait of ‘a thirty- or forty-something who grew up with tags, who may have tagged a little when he was young, and who has become a lawyer or a doctor’. Then, membership to a same mnemonic community of graffiti writers and of their artworks’ buyers (Jacobson, 2020) is suggested about ‘young collectors with high purchasing power due to their activity on the Internet who want to acquire works related to their times’. Finally, this triptych includes the ‘great collectors of contemporary art’ who buy ‘very established contemporary artists of the 1970s and 1980s, [and] are starting to diversify their collections with exceptional pieces of graffiti’ (Le Journal des arts, 2011).

Artistic investments are never limited to an economic or aesthetic dimension (Moulin, 1994; Vethuis, 2005). This is especially the case for graffiti artworks: the make-up of a collector also includes philanthropic aspects, through the organization of charity auctions. An Artcurial auction in 2010 financed ‘Paris tou’ p’tits’, a catholic non-profit organization engaged in combatting child malnutrition. Profits of the Pierre Bergé & Associés ³ thematic auction at the Palais de Tokyo in 2013 were donated to SOS Racisme, for struggling against discrimination. However, as far as the graffiti writers are directly concerned, there is no longer any question of rescuing ‘poor and racialized young people’, as New York gallerists used to present them in the 1980s, even when they were from stable working families (Lachman, 1988). Gallizia, the organizer of the TAG exhibition, rather claims to provide recognition to ‘knights of the street, fallen into disgrace’ (La Dépêche du Midi, 2011). Indeed, the collection of this exemplary case of an entrepreneur travelled from the Grand Palais to the Grimaldis’ Palace in Monaco, by way of the French Prime Minister’s office at the Hôtel Matignon (Beaux Arts Magazine, 2011). An official press release even shows a picture of the Prime Minister and Bando posing together in front of one of the graffiti pioneer’s canvas. Stressing the affiliation of Bando with the Lehmann banking family, Gallizia staged the homology of a ‘co-opted elite of graffiti artists’ with an ‘elite of graffiti art collectors’ (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Special issue of Connaissance des Arts, Tag et graff au Grand Palais, 2009 (picture credited to Pierre Guillien, reproduced with kind permission from Alain-Dominique Gallizia and Connaissance des Arts editorial team).

The Graffiti et Princesses exhibition was built on these ambivalences and organized under the patronage of Tania de Bourbon de Parme by Emmanuel De Brantes, nephew of the former French President Valéry Giscard D’Estaing. The exhibition press kit was devoted to Psyckoze, a Parisian pioneer, describing him as a descendant of a ‘long line of aristocrats who served under the Russian tsars’. The Graffiti Project of Lord Glasgow, whose Scottish mansion’s facades were painted by the Brazilian Os Gemeos, also illustrates how such entrepreneurs perform unexpected analogies between a graffiti writers’ aristocracy and a more traditional one.

By promoting artworks of renowned graffiti writers, entrepreneurs are also seeking to make their investments profitable, looking for what Gallizia refers to as ‘a collector rich enough to support the rating of an artist by buying everything from him’. Such collectors are rare, although anecdotes are told about their extravagance: for instance, a famous French businessman who would have bid up to 15,000 euros for a canvas at an Artcurial sale, just because his nine-year-old grandson liked it (Expert for Artcurial no. 2). However, the entrepreneurs generally refute the thesis of a speculative bubble. The valuation of both aesthetically and ethically inspired collectors aims to support the demand for graffiti art. This is what appears in the analysis by an interviewed associate of Gallizia on the acquisition by Laurence Parizot – former President of the French employers’ organization ⁴ – of a canvas by Quik. This New York graffiti pioneer, graduated from the Parson School of Design, has become a sure bet in contemporary art. Rejecting the idea of a communication strategy, he argues that if such a business leader poses in the newspapers with this canvas in her office, and also invites graffiti writers every year to paint a mural at the organization’s summer school, it is because she is a ‘real fan’. This entrepreneur also presents her as being ‘moved by this universe’, because she admires the freedom and energy of the graffiti writers. Parizot is thus willing to support them financially, ‘even if they do not agree with her political ideas’. Entrepreneurs thus play a key role in the social construction of the demand for graffiti art. But auctioneers get in touch more systematically with the major art buyers and keep control over the artworks’ reception.

The Established: Conditioning Artworks Reception

The heteronomy of graffiti art is never so strongly marked as through the control of the conditions of artwork reception by auctioneers. They occupy an established position on the art market compared with the experts and the entrepreneurs. Auctioneers do not only contribute to the theatrical production of price when they hold the hammer (Geismar, 2001: 43). Behind the scenes of the auctions, they foresee the artworks’ presentation to targeted audiences. Their professional legitimacy enables auctioneers to certify artworks’ value and to reduce transaction uncertainty (Karpik, 2010), especially for expensive purchases of influential collectors, to whom they are the only intermediaries with direct access.

The auction sector has been economically concentrated since the liberal reform of 2000 (Quemin, 2001) and the thematic sales of graffiti art are no exception: it is in the most important French auction houses, located in the wealthiest neighbourhoods of Paris, that the highest transactions are recorded, starting with Artcurial. Created in 1974 by the former L’Oréal CEO, this auction house was acquired in 2002 by the Dassault armaments group. Sotheby’s and Christie’s entrance into the market has pushed Artcurial down into third position in the French market. Nevertheless, Artcurial has been achieving a turnover of more than 200 million euros per year since its buyout, ‘urban art’ sales representing a small but growing proportion. The cumulative amount made by the ‘Contemporary Urban Art’ sale organized in February 2012 exceeded 1.5 million euros, and the press release emphasized the ‘spectacular success of the section devoted to trains and subways that opened the sale’. At an auction with a similar title in October 2016, the sale of 84% of the lots exceeded 2 million euros. Contemporary art sales are largely dominated by Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The emerging market of graffiti art thus appears all the more crucial for Artcurial and other smaller auction houses. That is why the Digard auction house created a department dedicated to ‘contemporary urban art’ in 2012. Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr is also particularly keen to compete in this niche market, as an expert for several thematic auctions from 2009 pointed out. Cornette de Saint-Cyr also readily cites graffiti and street art as ‘new mediums’ in which to invest in order to ‘live with the times’ and ‘remain competitive’ (Artsper.com, 2014). Nevertheless, Artcurial largely dominates the ‘urban art’ sector, accounting for more than 75% of sales in France in 2016, totalling 5 million euros excluding fees (Conseil National des Ventes, 2017).

The organization of such thematic auctions enabled the auctioneer Arnaud Oliveux to intensify his activities as Associate Director of the 20th and 21st Century Department. He became familiarized with graffiti writing when he was a Fine Arts and Law student in the early 2000s, attending exhibition openings at the initiative of a graffiti writer he met while doing a summer job as a museum guard. Although he largely delegated the selection work to experts, he played a significant role in the organization of the thematic sale, ‘trying to link graffiti to contemporary art but keeping it sufficiently authentic’. Auctioneers constantly showcase the ambivalence of artists and their works, between their claimed marginality and quest for legitimacy. Graffiti writers seeking recognition on the art market must internalize the constraint of references imposed by criticism, which is particularly encouraged by the most established intermediaries. This is the case of JonOne, whose artworks attained the highest selling price (24,800€) at the first Artcurial auction in 2007 and set a new record (128,500€) there in 2013. During his solo exhibition in a Parisian gallery, the magazine Connaissance des arts introduced him as a ‘spiritual son of Basquiat and Pollock’ who ‘was tagging subway cars in New York in the late 1970s’, but ‘orientated his art toward abstraction to become a fully-fledged contemporary artist’ (Connaissance des arts, 2011). The portfolio of the graffiti writer Fenx, whose paintings are sold by different auction houses, also stresses the influence of legitimate references:

Painters such as Torres Garcia, Lichtenstein, Soulages, Miro, Mondrian, Motherwell and others will then guide his inspiration to the style that is his today and which makes him recognized by an ever widening circle of well-informed collectors. (Montresso Art Fondation, 2014)

To obtain the rewards of the art market, graffiti writers most often leave the field open to intermediaries, who facilitate the identification of their work by attaching them to an existing branch of art or by labelling it as ‘urban art’. According to the interviewed Artcurial auctioneer, this brings graffiti closer to contemporary art collectors, ‘including the pure graffiti . . . that sold less well at first than more abstract things’. For established intermediaries, the simple equation of graffiti artworks with hip-hop culture implies ‘a big risk of falling into folklore’. In a similar way to rappers, it confines graffiti writers to a ‘ghetto’ from which they have to extract themselves, thanks to the help of cultural intermediaries, as part of an artistic legitimation process (Hammou, 2016). Nevertheless, the contextualization of their artworks contributes to conditioning their reception. Auctioneers paradoxically contribute to the ‘fabrication of authenticity’, that Peterson analysed about country music agents (1997), before Fine emphasized it as a central defining feature of the promotion of self-taught artists (2004). As regards graffiti art, this process is insufficient on its own, but necessary to confer value on objects and creators. Materially, the graffiti artworks’ authenticity is sublimated by the installation, on the walls of the Artcurial showroom, of the same tiles used in the corridors of the Parisian metro. Before another auction in 2015, the UV (Ultra-Violence) graffiti crew – renowned for its members’ strong presence in the Parisian streets – performed a mural in front of the Hôtel Drouot. The scenography of the vernissages is designed for potential buyers, but also for journalists, in order to strengthen the media impact and the artworks’ legitimation. Parisian auctions have attracted both general and artistic media since the first successes of 2006–2007, and art journalists’ comments have evolved from scorn and irony to the criticism of the ‘fashion’ or even ‘recovery effect’. However, the auctioneers also anticipate this criticism to better recover it. For instance, the catalogue of the thematic sale ‘1970–2010, 40 ans d’Art Graffiti’ combined establishment and anti-establishment strategies (Molnár, 2018). It glorifies the ambivalence of Cope2’s stance and his ability to voyage back and forth between ‘the streets’ and ‘the gentry’ (Arcturial, 2010: 22).

Like entrepreneurs, auctioneers perform friendly relationships with graffiti stars (Figure 3), but their social proximity to contemporary art collectors is more obvious, and their professional status makes them their favoured interlocutors. Given these collectors’ purchasing power, Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr (see Figure 4) or Arnaud Oliveux are willing to ‘accompany’ some collectors in their graffiti ‘discoveries’. The 2017 report on contemporary art auctions in France of the Conseil National des Ventes thus comments on the evolution of collectors’ attitude towards ‘urban art’ auctions: ‘We have moved from a trendy event to something much more rooted in the collector’s experience.’

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Anaud Oliveux, Artcurial auctioneer, posing with graffiti writers Bom-K, Brusk and Gris1, Artcurial, Paris, 2015. (Picture credited to Kan DMV reproduced with his kind permission).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr – art dealer and auctioneer – TAG Exhibition, Grand Palais, Paris, 2009. (Photo by author).

The report also points out that this segment attracts ‘collectors of contemporary art, who invest in renowned artists (artworks of €25,000 or more) and who seek a certain proximity to the artists and their environment’. But such collectors often prefer to manage their purchases remotely, by ‘leafing through a beautiful catalog deposited at home’. This means ‘booking a phone’ with the auctioneer who directs the sale, even though auctions are traditionally social events among the French elite (Pinçon-Charlot and Pinçon, 2000).

The most established intermediaries aim not only to ensure that the artworks’ content appears favourably to potential buyers, but also that their price remains high enough so as not to delegitimize them. For that purpose, they intervene in the artists’ production process by encouraging them to preserve the rarity of their works. The Artcurial auctioneer explains that he encouraged JonOne to limit his production, for reassuring collectors about the quality and originality of his work. This imperative was amplified by a case of counterfeiting of the graffiti writer’s canvases in the early 2010s, which was both mediatized and brought to court at his advantage (Le Monde, 2014). Auctioneers play a similar role to museum directors establishing the rarity of folk-art pieces as artistic value, which provides the potential for acclaim within the art market (Moulin, 1994). But in this case, it is the success of auctions that favours recognition by museum institutions, rather than the opposite. As the success of thematic auctions increases, the rarity criterion is combined with the age of the works. Auctioneers tend to select works by New York pioneers, not only for their ‘vintage aspect that some collectors like’ (Artcurial auctioneer), but for the certification of their value resulting from previous transactions (Velthuis, 2005). The established can thus do without graffiti experts while remaining essential to the artwork’s commercialization. New York pioneer Seen, who opened a gallery in Paris in 2010 with the explicit slogan ‘Straight from the artist’, closed down after a few months. The Artcurial auctioneer affirms that ‘this put Seen in a bad light’; but the artist was ‘forgiven’ once he had auctioned new paintings through an agent: in 2012, setting a new personal record (96,000 €) at Artcurial, that he broke (108,000 €) two months later at Drouot.

Conclusion

In the late-emerging niche of graffiti art, various cultural intermediaries contribute to artworks’ selection, valuation and reception through their different activities, linked to their social resources and trajectories. Experts, entrepreneurs and established auctioneers appear to be both essential and complementary. This is evidenced by the failure of self-intermediation attempts, even for the best-known graffiti writers. However, the auctions’ organization generates unequal profits. They mainly benefit the most established players in the art market. Auctioneers are gradually managing to do without the other intermediaries, focusing their activities on artworks whose value has already been proven on the market by previous transactions. They can thus extend their business at little cost, compared to some entrepreneurs whose investments in artists who are up-and-coming – or not – are not always successful. As regards graffiti experts, they do not always become true professionals in the art market, especially when they remain confined to a segment whose boundaries are better identified than for street art. Beyond graffiti writing, this case study provides two avenues for discussion: first, on the globalization of the contemporary art market and transformation of power relations among its intermediaries; second, on the impact of artification processes of subcultural practices.

The successful commercialization of graffiti artworks needs to be related to the opportunities offered by a global and changing art market. The most established intermediaries insist on the international mobility of graffiti artists. By so doing, they follow their potential clients, who move between New York and Paris, via London or Amsterdam (Schultheis et al., 2016; Velthuis and Brandallero, 2018). However, the valuation mechanism based on the dialectical relationship between public and market players (Moulin, 1994) has shifted towards the latter. Major collectors compete with or even exceed public institutions in their purchasing and exhibition capacities (Quemin, 2015). They sometimes even directly guide their programming, as shown by the organization of graffiti events in prestigious museums. As far as auctioneers are concerned, they appear as trustworthy brokers between artists and potential buyers, especially for emerging art categories regarding which there is a lack of independent critics (Kharchenkova and Velthuis, 2018). Regarding the experts who are socially closer to the artists, they remain decisive for the selection or production of new artworks, despite their dominated position in the division of intermediation labour. This acceptance and validation of artists and intermediaries coming from the graffiti subculture also reveals a major evolution in the contemporary art world in recent decades. An increasing part of its renewal is the work of intermediaries building aesthetic niches by bringing together artists whose original practices appear to be authentic because of their distance from public institutions and the market (Heinich, 2014). Incidentally, this evolution is reminiscent of one observed earlier in the music industry (Peterson, 1997). Fabricating the authenticity of graffiti writers whose creative activities are intended for the art market is necessary, but insufficient to ensure their success. It is also determined by the following of rules of the contemporary art market, or by the controlled transgression of these rules, through the collaboration of different categories of intermediaries.

One may wonder about what backlash effects such an artification process has on the underlying subcultural practices. It probably impacts their evolution, in particular for those who combine them with legitimate art and commercial design (Molnàr, 2018). Graffiti writers who have been successful on the art market are also among the most influential on their peers. Indeed, their paintings on walls and trains often are widely diffused by subcultural communications. If the evolution of graffiti writers’ practices remains little investigated by existing academic works, as well as the evolution of their social profiles (Ross et al., 2017), the transformations of their dominant representations can be taken into account. The success of graffiti artwork marketing, of which thematic auctions are the most striking example, seems to reduce some stereotypes related to the subculture they are derived from. This process can be compared to the integration of a faction of jazz musicians into wage-earning society, which helped to erase some deviant aspects of this musical genre (Coulangeon, 1999). This is exacerbated when some graffiti writers, more explicitly oriented towards an institutional recognition than most of their peers, are associated by dominant cultural intermediaries with successful artists, unrelated to graffiti, but ‘who are inspired by it and claim an underground culture on the fringes of contemporary art’ (Conseil National des Ventes, 2017). Thus, it seems relevant to question how such an evolution provides economic and symbolic benefits for graffiti writers, according to their social background and trajectories. Not all of them who start to paint on marketable supports can be categorized as ‘self-taught artists’, sufficiently distant from the art world to avoid its specific logics affecting their production (Fine, 2004). It should be documented more systematically how conversion strategies and profits differ between a prestigious art school graduate and a low-qualified employee from a disadvantaged neighbourhood. Class-based discrimination is undoubtedly stronger than in the case of court sentences for painting on trains (Vaslin and Weill, 2020). Nevertheless, voyaging between the graffiti world and the art market is increasingly common, in a process of mutual legitimization of the graffiti writers and cultural intermediaries who are both bridging and reproducing the gap.

Finally, this article challenges assumptions that graffiti writing could be purely ‘ineffably subcultural’ (Macdonald, 2001) or essentially ‘fueled by subcultural recognition’ (Snyder, 2009). As with other subcultural practices, heteronomous motivations sometimes lead to the accumulation of subcultural capital, which some individuals ‘make a living from’ (Thornton, 1995: 28). It thus illustrates a larger process of increasing interdependence between the art market where transactions are made and the social fields where the homologation of symbolic goods’ value is achieved (Moulin, 1994). However, one may argue that the market’s hold on subcultures such as graffiti writing tends to be limited, since their artification is socially selective. This ultimately raises the question of the variability of the conversion rate of subcultural capital according to individuals and contexts.