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Mysterious, an elusive street artist known as Banksy, his graffiti creations have sold for millions of dollars if you can find them. But a few lucky people realized he was actually selling his work for, oh, $60 a pop on the streets of New York City. ABC's Lindsey Janice has a story.
A French painter once said, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see," and that was certainly the case in New York's Central Park where this stall popped up selling what appears to be stencil art knockoffs from the famed British street artist. FY, of course, these have to be knockoffs since they're priced at $60, and Banksy's original works go for upwards of $20,000 per stencil. Now imagine how much more interested these passersby would be if they just took time to see that these are indeed original works from the artist himself, signed, one even with his phone number.
Banksy, who appeared in this 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary about his life, has never let anyone see his face. Street art has a short lifespan, so it needed documenting. The sale began at 11:30 a.m., but it wasn't until 4 hours later they found a buyer, a woman who negotiated half off the $60 price tag. Thirty minutes later, a New Zealand woman buys two, and an hour and a half after that, a man who says he needs something for his walk walks off with four more.
For the shoppers, impulse buys that promise to reap rewards for a long time to come. In fact, those Banksy works could be worth tens of thousands of dollars--a pretty good return on an investment there. The British graffiti artist has been in New York since the start of this month, and he's created more than 10 pieces of his art on walls, streets, even cars. Many of them, though, already have been defaced or painted over, so New York is not showing him too much love.
"Which block do we go to? Yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, I wish I wish I'd passed by that uh, that stand."