A bold move, which does not fear the feedback of collectors, despite the unknowns being more than one. In fact, there is no official name behind the origin of the works, but the names of the artists who will be auctioned are known: Alice Pasquini, Mauro Pallotta, Diamond, Solo, Jerico, Mirco Marcacci, Mauro Sgarbi.
The negotiation with which Arcadia wants to become a pioneer in the urban art market was conducted with the utmost confidentiality by choice of the owner himself, who wants very little to be known about himself. A sort of patron unaccustomed to the lights of the curatorial world, but who has been able to bring to the fore some of the most well-known young talents, even abroad. A patron mister x who, somewhat following in the footsteps of Banksy, even more famous because anonymous, has granted the Arcadia Auction House part of his precious collection, with the intention of proposing all the facets of a heterogeneous art, including thousands of codes.
A provocation? An operation aimed at unmasking the gradual transition of urban art from rebellion to business, from counterculture to mainstream?
Not exactly. Certainly today we are very far from the times of Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat, a time when graffiti was pure rebellion and counter-current communication. Street artists in 2016 are hired by the municipal administrations to redevelop the suburbs, or even go on display in important museums, with all due respect to their opposition, as for the exhibition dedicated to Banksy at Palazzo Cipolla until 4 September, or the exhibition Bolognese which will close soon and which he has hung on the walls of Palazzo Pepoli – after having removed them from the city streets – walls, shutters, slabs, stones, wooden planks with paintings by Blu, Banksy, Ericailcane, Invader, Dran, Os Gemeos on them , Obey, Ron English.
The intent of the Arcadia Auction House, certainly still immature but which precisely by virtue of this freshness can allow itself greater risks, is not so much provocation, but the possibility of providing the collector with a key to interpreting such a heterogeneous and so complex that it is often difficult to classify it in economic parameters. There is frequent controversy about why the so-called graffiti artists go too easily from giving away their works done on city walls, to then having them paid handsomely by the gallery owners when they are made on other supports.
The idea on which Arcadia wants to focus on June 20th is that of the double code of urban art: an art born clandestinely and therefore on the one hand fast, athletic, made up of body and caducous because it is exposed to the elements; but also an art that has evolved in various currents and styles, acquiring a qualitative exoskeleton in which it could be worth investing as is done for well-known names on the contemporary scene, which are and will always be equally present at auctions. Urban art undoubtedly remains in the public eye, whether it is made on the walls of the city, on objects or on canvas. The Street Art section of Auction n.3 of Arcadia is therefore not a provocation. It is rather a test on that famous ear of Van Gogh, metaphorically mentioned by Basquiat himself.
