Banksy’s Former Manager Sells His Trove of Artworks and Other Objects Connected to the Anonymous Street Artist
Steve Lazarides’ personal collection of prints, original works, handwritten press releases and burner phones sold at auction for around $1.4 million
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Banksy’s former manager has auctioned off a trove of prints and original artworks by the infamously elusive street artist, netting roughly $1.4 million. Steve Lazarides, who started working with Banksy more than two decades ago, sold his collection through Julien’s Auctions on October 31.
“This has been a large part of my life for the last 25 years, whether I was working with him or not,” Lazarides, who is also a photographer, tells the Guardian’s Pamela Chelin. “I just want it out of my in-tray and to go back to concentrating on taking photographs again.”
The most expensive artwork was an original print of Girl With Balloon (circa 2004), which sold for $104,000. Other highlights included a proof print of Love Is in the Air (aka Flower Thrower) (circa 2003) that sold for $45,500 and an original hand-cut stencil of Banksy’s name that went for $58,500.
Lazarides met Banksy in Bristol in 1997, when he photographed and interviewed the street artist for Sleazenation magazine. They started working together, with Lazarides overseeing the commercial aspects of Banksy’s operation and acting as his point person. The duo would sell unsigned prints for £35, while signed prints went for £150.
“We wanted them to be cheap so that the average person could buy them,” Lazarides told Barnebys magazine’s Pontus Silfverstolpe in 2019. “We didn’t do it for the money. You have to remember that Banksy hardly made any money from the sales; it was the people who bought and resold them who did. Today, a signed Girl With Balloon that we had sold for £200 goes for £800,000 on the secondary market.”
Eventually, the steadily rising prices started to wear on Lazarides, who saw the commercialization of Banksy’s art as a sharp departure from the artist’s origins. “He never went into it for money,” he tells the Guardian. “It wasn’t fine art. This was on the streets for everybody.”
Lazarides ultimately decided that he wanted to focus on other artists, parting ways with Banksy in 2008. He has since worked with artists such as Jonathan Yeo (who painted a controversial portrait of Charles III earlier this year), JR and Vhils, as he told Art Plugged’s Len Gordon in 2022. About five years ago, he also published the book Banksy Captured, an inside look into the anonymous artist’s rise to stardom.
He tells the Guardian that working with Banksy was a “full-time job.” Now, he hopes that selling off his collection will allow him to shift his attention back to photography.
In addition to the artworks, Lazarides auctioned off other items connected to the street artist, such as handwritten press releases and installation notes, vintage flyers, and a worn pair of special edition Puma sneakers tied to a 2003 exhibition.
The sale also included 15 burner phones that he’d used to contact Banksy discreetly during his time as the artist’s manager. In the first years of Banksy’s stardom, Lazarides was hounded by the press for names and pictures of the anonymous artist.
“The media was chasing us around the clock,” he told Barnebys magazine. “But after a while, I think they realized that if they were to expose the anonymous artist and instead write, for example, ‘Dave Smith from Brighton,’ the magic would go away.”