Matthew Collings

Do you like adolescent entertainment? Do you have the mentality of a teenager? Do you find Cézanne a bit overrated? If the answer is yes, yes and yes, then I don’t know what to do with you. You are a childish philistine literalist. Get down to Bonhams (one of the world’s oldest and largest auctioneers of fine art and antiques) next Tuesday for their first-ever dedicated sale of “street art” – this is the experience for you.

“Street art” means graffiti, comics-style stuff, spray-paint art, flyposting – the art of groovy youth. The stars of the street-art sale will include Banksy, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Antony Micallef, Adam Neate, Faile, Paul Insect, Space Invader, Swoon, D*Face and Shepard Fairey.

Basquiat, who died of an overdose in 1988, was funny and witty, and he had a great sense of bitter irony about black cultural history: he shared this sensibility with many people. But he was a great mark-maker, an arranger of forms, he could make surfaces breath and colours sing, and all this made him extremely rare. As an artist Haring (who died of an Aids-related illness three years after Basquiat) was nothing like in Basquiat’s league: he had commercial appeal but was too visually repetitive and sterile to be significant beyond his own brief moment. Basquiat’s shining light shows up the visual boredom of the rest of the “street art” crew – they are funny and punky, sure, but, well, who isn’t?

Gareth Williams, the urban-art specialist at Bonhams, says: “By transposing their images from street wall to canvas, urban artists are now creating a permanent legacy without compromising the vitality of their art.” Poor Williams – how giddy and weightless life must be for him, to be in the business of using words without having any interest in what they mean.

“Vitality” is what Matisse or Goya has, or Islamic mosaics, or Greek statues, or abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock – all that old obscure stuff. Vitality in art is a rare quality, it means life – you see it and you feel life is worth living. It goes with originality and surprise, a mixture of the fresh and the eternal. It’s found throughout the history of art. It’s the opposite of convention and routine. The point about street art is that it has to conform to street-art convention. It has to be a routine. It has to express the personality of a stoner, grinning, funny and kidlike.

What can you get at the auction? You can be the owner of Banksy’s Laugh Now, in stencil paint on canvas, for only £40,000. It shows a chimp with a sign round its neck that reads: “You can laugh but one day we’ll be in charge.” What would you really be buying? A status symbol – the work has no value as art. But owning it would make you modern and clever. Or stupid. It’s a fine line.

A work by Banksy sold at auction for £288,000 last April. He is collected by Damien Hirst, who we know is incredibly wealthy – but so what? Hirst’s paintings of his son being born cost £1 million each and visually they are junk. They are only valuable because of a market consensus, not because they connect to anything important. Most of life is made up of trivia, and there’s nothing wrong with celebrating it. But it’s something else again to revere it as if it’s the pyramids; there’s something sick about that.

“Street art” is adolescent. With the exception of Basquiat, the artists whose work is on sale at Bonhams next week are talented people in that area, but the area itself is of absolutely no interest unless you’ve got an arrested mentality. Its rise as something to take seriously says something about the weird state of art now. The core of art today is satire and gags and attention-getting stunts. As a society we all kind of know this but somehow we also accept that it’s a social faux pasever to mention it. Banksy being considered a “conceptual artist” is only a measure of how banal and feeble the “concepts” of contemporary art are, and an indication of art’s slide into all-out philistinism. To appear tuned-in we now have to pretend that a literal crack in the floor at Tate Modern means global unease (the latest commission by Tate Modern in its annual Unilever series), that a lot of real people standing on a marble plinth means “humanity” (Anthony Gormley’s proposal for a new work on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square) and that Marc Quinn’s new sculptures at White Cube of foetuses are “influenced by Michelangelo”.

Banksy’s ideas only have the value of a joke. What is an idea in real or high art? This is a puzzle for Williams, Bonhams press-release writer, but also apparently a puzzle for the guardians and spokespersons of culture now. When contemporary-art explainers are asked on to Radio 4’s Front Row or BBC Two’s Late Review to enthuse about new art shows, the hosts never challenge the rubbish they spout. Mark Lawson doesn’t know about art, but also he doesn’t want to seem offensive. And yet he does know about ideas, and he must see that Anthony Gormley doesn’t really have them in any important sense – Lawson starts reasonably enough, not wanting to appear gauche in a conversation about art, but he ends up actually believing the bullshit.

The result is a culture subscribed to by many, many intelligent people, in which another level of meaning operates where art is concerned than the level that operates for, say, books by J. M. Coetzee. With the former we accept an unaesthetic experience and an explanation that is shallow where it is not incomprehensible. And with the latter we’re in awe of wit, learning, craft, knowledge and surprise; we’re amazed that the depths of what it feels like to be a suffering, feeling, joyful, thinking human being right now can be captured by art. With Banksy (as with Hirst) we’re just amazed that he could be so rich.

— The Bonhams Urban Art auction will be at 101 New Bond Street, W1, on Tuesday, February 5, at 7pm Matthew Collings’s new book, This is Civilisation, is out now (21 Publishing, rrp £25, Times Bookshop £22.50, free p&p)

Laughing all the way to the Banksy

Online bidding for a wall painted on by Banksy closed earlier this month with a final price of £208,100, after 69 bids. The owner of the wall, Luti Fagbenle, estimated that the cost of removal of the piece would be around £5,000, to be paid by the buyer.

In October 2006, a Banksy painting used for the cover of Blur’s Think Tank album – of an embracing couple dressed in deep-sea diving gear – sold at Bonhams for £62,400, ten times the original estimate.

The previous month, the graffiti artist staged a show in Los Angeles, at which Angelina Jolie is reported to have spent £200,000 on his work. Christina Aguilera is another celebrity fan – she visited Banksy’s Soho gallery during a trip to London in April 2006 and paid £25,000 for three works, including one depicting Queen Victoria in a lesbian clinch with a prostitute.

Bombing Middle England, a painting of pensioners playing bowls with bombs, fetched a whopping £102,000, more than double its highest estimated price of £50,000, at Sotheby’s in February last year.

In the same sale, Banksy’s Balloon Girl sold for £37,200, and another work called Bomb Hugger for £31,200.