KAWS

KAWS is Brian Donnelly, who worked in animation before altering the advertisements inside New York and Tokyo bus shelters — adding crossed-out eyes and a skull-like head to the models in the frames. Out of that came the Companion, and out of the Companion came one of the broadest markets in contemporary art. The same figure exists as a unique painting, as monumental bronze, as a fibreglass sculpture in an edition of five, as a vinyl toy in an edition of several thousand, and as a Uniqlo T-shirt. All of them are KAWS. Almost none of them are comparable.

So the entire job here is placing the object in that hierarchy, and photographs alone frequently cannot do it. The tiers run roughly: unique acrylic paintings on canvas at the top, then large fibreglass and bronze sculpture in small editions, then the resin and vinyl figures released in editions of a few hundred to several thousand, then open-edition prints, then collaborative product. Original box, hangtags and certificate are a substantial part of the value of anything editioned, and a figure separated from its packaging loses a real proportion of what it would otherwise make.

Counterfeiting is a serious and well-organised problem at the toy end, and the fakes are good. Provenance to the original release, the retailer and the date matters more here than for most contemporary artists, because the object itself is mass-produced and offers fewer tells than a hand-made one does. The Bus Shelter works from the 1990s — intercepted advertising, painted over and returned to the frame — are the scarce historical material and require documented provenance of their own.

The market moved very fast between 2019 and 2021 and has been uneven since, which makes acquisition date and route more relevant to a valuation than they would be for a settled name. That is not a warning about the work. It is a reason to price from recent evidence rather than from what a comparable made at the peak.