Beyond the Hype: The True Value of Art from Street Myths to Studio Mastery
On the 13th of March, the ultimate phantom of the street art world was seemingly dragged into the daylight. Following a dogged investigation, Reuters journalists unmasked Banksy, naming the enigmatic Bristolian as Robin Gunningham, a chap in his mid-fifties now going by the name of David Jones. Pest Control, the notoriously tight-lipped outfit responsible for authenticating his work, merely batted the claims away, stating the artist had “nothing to say” regarding the revelations. Predictably, an army of fans and sympathisers were gutted, furious that the press would stoop to ruining a perfectly good mystery.
But while the internet kicked up a fuss over the ethics of doxing a cultural icon, the deep-pocketed art elite were chewing over a far more cynical question: what exactly happens to the price tag when the ghost gets a face?
The answer came hammering down at a recent New York auction. Girl and Balloon on Found Landscape, a piece dating back to 2012, hit the block in an exclusive sale with a thirteen-million-dollar starting bid. It ultimately changed hands for an eye-watering $17,940,000. This comfortably put to bed any fears floated by the likes of the German investment magazine Sachwert, who had openly wondered whether stripping away Banksy’s aura of the unfathomable might damage his myth and, consequently, his market value. Clearly, he has been unmasked, but for the global art elite, the magic remains thoroughly intact.
Curiously, the mega-collector Peter Brant reckoned this revelation might actually grease the wheels for serious buyers. Owning works by the likes of Keith Haring, Brant told the Wall Street Journal that splashing millions on absolute anonymity is a tough sell because “you’re basically buying folklore.” The market craves a narrative trajectory; it wants to know who the artists are and how they develop. It wants flesh and blood.
And frankly, this relentless market obsession with an artist’s persona makes one long for art that bypasses the hype and speaks simply through raw, unadulterated craft. Which brings us, rather serendipitously, away from the chaotic auction houses of New York to a quiet pop-up store in Freising, Bavaria.
Here, the draw isn’t a manufactured myth, but a striking, visceral blue that practically pulls you off the street. Across a massive canvas, a young man sits soft and introverted, lost in thought behind a thick tangle of what looks like mangrove roots. This is the work of the Freising-based painter Sallie McIlerhan, and it is an absolute masterclass in draughtsmanship. Rather than relying on the gimmicks of contemporary street art, McIlerhan anchors her practice firmly in the soil of the “Old Masters”. Having cut her teeth in the nineties at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Professor Wolfgang Hutter—the godfather of Fantastic Realism—she commands an encyclopaedic grasp of Renaissance panel painting, glazing rules, and graphic nuances.
Yet, this isn’t merely academic flexing. What elevates McIlerhan’s canvases is her uncanny knack for threading the needle between cold outward reality and the messy depths of human emotion, perfectly capturing the sitter’s true character. “I feel humility and deep gratitude that I can paint,” she admits—a rather refreshing departure from the aloof posturing typical of the blue-chip scene.
This deep-seated reverence for the human form has heavily coloured her academic career, having held guest professorships at West Texas University in Canyon and Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, her hometown. It’s a transatlantic journey that took an amusing turn in 2012—incidentally, the same year Banksy painted his multi-million-dollar landscape. Tobias Eschenbacher, Freising’s newly minted mayor at the time, tagged along to McIlerhan’s exhibition at the Norwood Flynn Gallery in Dallas to act as her laudator. He happily played the role of her “Hometown Mayor”, a memory Eschenbacher fondly recalled whilst having a look around her current pop-up on Tuesday.
Tucked away in the back of the Freising space, a quiet counter-narrative to the grand, expensive spectacles of the art world is unfolding. Visitors can flip through a stash of fantastic life drawings, some softly colourised, born out of the workshops she runs locally and in Munich. These sketches strip away all the noise, the folklore, and the million-dollar price tags. “We are all human. We all have the same framework, the same body,” the painter remarks. “People mean a lot to me.”
Perhaps that’s the crux of it all. Whether it is an anonymous bloke from Bristol finally having his cover blown to satisfy the market, or a Freising painter painstakingly capturing the quiet dignity of a sitter, art ultimately strips us bare. We just pay wildly different prices for the privilege.
