Barcode

Barcode has never carried the recognition of Girl with Balloon or Pulp Fiction, and that shows in how it trades: less volatility, fewer speculative bidders and a price history that moves in something closer to a line.

For an owner deciding when and how to sell, that is genuinely useful. A quieter image is less exposed to the swings that hit the famous ones after 2021, and comparable results are more reliable as a guide because they are less distorted by a single exceptional bid.

The image depends on the crisp parallel lines of the barcode, and any disturbance to them is conspicuous in a way it would not be on a looser image.

A crease running across the bars, a scuff through the flat ground, or ink loss along a fold all read immediately. This is a print where a condition report should be made from the sheet in raking light rather than from a straight-on photograph.

The reported 150 signed against 600 unsigned is the standard shape for the period, and the two are catalogued and valued separately.

On a less famous image the signed premium tends to be proportionally tighter than on the headline prints, because the buyers are collectors of the artist's work rather than people buying a recognisable picture. That is a reason to value against this edition's own results rather than against the pattern of the market as a whole.