When street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled sold for $110.5 million in 2017, famed art dealer and curator Jeffrey Deitch (MBA 1978) told the New York Times that the artist was “now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso.”

Basquiat’s ascension is not an aberration. Street and graffiti artists like Banksy and KAWS—the latter famous for his remixes of pop culture figures like The Simpsons and SpongeBob SquarePants—are rising fixtures in the art world, headlining significant museum shows, designing album covers, and fetching tens of millions of dollars at auctions in recent years.

How did a style born on the canvas of the city make the leap from the subway to Sotheby’s? Assistant Professor James Riley, a former graffiti artist himself who now studies valuation processes in culturally embedded markets, says that these artists’ paths to prominence began as a social process of “cultural consecration” within the artist’s own community and on the city’s streets, then progressed to high-profile shows and museum exhibits. “That part is certainly about social legitimacy and cultural relevance, and the consecration process creates a certain value that is then built upon to create a market value—which is a separate type of validation,” says Riley, who credits Deitch’s time as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and his Art in the Streets exhibition with raising the profile of contemporary graffiti artists.

Yet cultural consecration does not necessarily translate to higher auction prices. Artist Barry McGee, for instance, started in the 1990s graffiti scene in San Francisco and has had a long, revered career filled with shows at high-profile museums, but his pieces are priced far below those of his contemporary KAWS. The discrepancy between the value of the two artists’ work reflects a difference in market approach. “Barry is not a careerist; he doesn’t really care about that,” says Deitch. “He cares more about his community, his circle of friends. And that’s who he’s really making the art for.” KAWS, on the other hand, with his line of collectible figurines and collaborations with clothing brands like Dior and Air Jordan, “understands very well how art is communicated, says Deitch. “He is someone who is open to all that, and he’s just now beginning to get the art elite to support his work.”

With that kind of attention, some market safeguards can kick in. Big art galleries manage the value of a piece by deciding who is even allowed to bid on it; Riley has described the modern art market as “a semiprivate social club that screens new entrants to determine whether they are qualified for membership.” It’s a relatively recent development, says Deitch, related to a rising imbalance of demand: “Fifty years ago, there was much more good art available than there were collectors. Now, for some of the young artists I show, we get more than 100 emails for each available painting. So it’s completely skewed.”

But art dealers also have to protect against flippers and hoarders. The former are simply looking to make a profit, and the latter are keeping the piece hidden in a warehouse rather than lending it to museums so that the public can enjoy the work—and keeping the artists’ profile on the rise. “You need someone who is going to support the artists in that fundamental way,” Deitch says.

Inherent to this discussion about how value is created in the art market, says Riley, is an understanding that “there is no objective, external measure of quality or even value in certain contexts—and we are now very aware that it is constructed, so people start being more articulate about what it is they’re trying to construct.”

Riley offers the various cryptocurrency-enthusiast communities as an example. “These coins are like social movements: People are getting behind them because they believe in the person who created it or the joke behind it,” he says. “And what they really believe in is just storming barricades and being barbarians and shaking things up.” As the principal investigator of the new blackbox Lab, which was launched by the Digital, Data, and Design Institute at Harvard in January, Riley is exploring what lessons from these kinds of cultural markets can transfer. “These are markets where there is not necessarily intrinsic value to the products themselves. The products are a cultural object that take their resonance and value from being cultural—meaning not utilitarian—and reflecting the culture of a people or a place.”

Consider graffiti art, for example. Its rising value correlates with a growing number of people who want to support the culture behind it. “Graffiti art is appreciated today for its persistence but also for what it represents to people,” says Riley. “It’s not just that graffiti art has gotten better and so now it’s more valuable, or that graffiti artists became prolific, notorious, or famous and now their artwork is going up in value. All those things play a part. But it’s also that people want to get behind things that brought them meaning or that represent the meaning that they’d like to see being expressed in the world.”

Deitch says that kind of support is still far from universal. Even with the rising values, there remain powers in the art world who are uninterested in the work of street and graffiti artists. “The support of some of the real art elite—the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum—is still not there,” says Deitch. “So one of my missions, going back many, many years, is to make sure these artists have their place in art history.”

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