Street Art, Auctions & NFTs: How Tech Is Transforming the Art World

Orlando Wood (00:10)
So that should be us started. So yeah, great. Dude, thank you so much for doing this. I’m really excited. Yeah, so you and I have known each other quite some time. now when you and I met, you were at Lazarides Gallery representing artists like Banksy and Faile and Connor Harrington, Johnny Yeo, JR and Invader. mean, a really remarkable roster.

Ralph Taylor (00:22)
Yeah.

Orlando Wood (00:31)
and now you’re at Bonhams as a head of 21st and 20th and 21st century, art. you started your career at Sotheby’s, you know, looking back at your career, is there anything about it that’s given you kind of a unique perspective on, you know, on your job now and, and how you see the industry?

Ralph Taylor (00:51)
Well, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Love an intro like that. And I think actually the unique thing that… Well, I would say it’s unique, but it’s very, very unusual is the idea that you go from Sotheby’s, which I did at the very beginning of 2008, to go and work at gallery called Lazarides, which was basically representing all of these absolute tyros from the…

particularly the street art community, but also a lot of contemporary and up and coming artists, you know, it just wasn’t the done thing. If you make it into the kind of specialist rank, you’re kind of, you’ve got tenure, basically. You stay there forever. So leaving then to move from the secondary market back into the primary market, you know, directly with the artists, that’s pretty unusual. I haven’t come across really anyone who’s done that.

So I think going from resell, which is what Sotheby’s does and obviously what I do at Bonhams, you know, from Monet through to present day in this environment down to the primary market when you’re really dealing with, know, I think Veals when we started working with him was like 19 years old. He’s now one of the one of the great figures in European art, particularly in the kind of populist, if I could call it that side of things.

So yeah, they’re night and day in terms of the distinction and frankly, since I left there 11 years ago, having had six years with the young artists, I’ve used that kind of, that duopoly, that kind of, you know, almost binary experience between auction houses at Sotheby’s and then, you know, the most cutting edge and ludicrous of primary market galleries at Lazarides, which you will remember, I can see a smile on your face.

Orlando Wood (02:41)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (02:43)
to kind of, you know, basically poach a term, “gamekeeper, turned poacher” again, back in my time at Bonhams. So it’s really been helpful.

Orlando Wood (02:53)
is there a sense when you leave someplace like Sotheby’s, is there a sense that you’ve left the game of musical chairs and when you come back, there will not be a place for you ever again?

Ralph Taylor (03:02)
Yeah, well, you’ve got to fight so hard, know, and we used to have to sleep under our desk for a pittance, salary-wise, and work every weekend. Like, I think my record when I was at Sotheby’s was a young fellow with something like 24 weekends in a row, crazy stuff. And it’s fun and you learn a lot, my God, you learn a lot. But, you know, to get through that nightmare and then have made it, and then to give it all up to sort of…

go and hang out with a bunch of reprobates was seen as being foolish. I mean, it was the best decision I’ve made, but certainly at the time it was a very dangerous decision to

Orlando Wood (03:42)
Right. Now, and you made that decision sort of right in the heart or was it on the come up of the street art movement, and went to, you know, work with Steve Lazarides, as you say, a madman in many respects, but a very clever and charismatic one. You know,

That feels like kind of one of the last great movements to have gone through the art world. And you were kind of very much at the center of that in London and at the Lazarides Gallery. it what they were doing that was very attractive? Was it the interest in just being on the other side and be working closer with artists? What brought you there and made you wanna give that a try?

Ralph Taylor (04:23)
Well, certainly I wanted to work with artists, but then, you know, as I always say to people who say that to me now, it’s like, don’t work with artists. They’re absolute nightmares, prima donnas. And it’s fair enough because being an artist is the hardest job in the world. You some 28 year old like me says, right, we’re going to do a show in a year. Here’s what I expect, yada, yada, yada. And then the only way you can tell if it’s a success is if someone that you’ve never met.

Orlando Wood (04:37)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (04:50)
is willing to pay a totally arbitrary price set by me on a given day. You know, it’s a very challenging environment. yes, to work with the artist, although I didn’t realize how challenging and delightful that would be when I did leave. But yeah, something that really struck me is I was 26 years old, 25 years old, 2005 I was at Sotheby’s, and I was looking after the part three sales as it was known, so like the…

Orlando Wood (04:54)
Right. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (05:14)
little things by very famous artists and big things by unknown artists. And so I was looking after that and we put a Banksy piece in one of the sales and the exhibition opened on a Wednesday morning in Kensington Olympia where Sotheby’s the kind of, you know, the tertiary gallery space. And waiting outside, waiting outside on its own is unheard of, but waiting outside was

you know, a few people and at the front was a grandmother, you 70 something year old grandmother with her teenage grandson and they come to see this painting. And that for me was a real light bulb. just thought if an artist is cutting through in this way, that’s exciting. And it’s not like I had a huge frame of reference from personal experience, but it was a real eye-opener to me.

Orlando Wood (05:50)
Wow.

Ralph Taylor (06:07)
And certainly in that period, in the kind of mid-noughties, was when social media was really kicking off. can’t remember when Facebook started, but it must have been around then, Twitter and things like that. in the nineties and previous, street art particularly had been something that was very ephemeral. mean, the whole point, you put a tag up and it gets buffed straight away or maybe some brave or ignorant…

artists will come and tag over it, you’re not supposed to do that of course, but and then suddenly you have the internet and people are taking photographs of these things and they’re living forever and being communicated globally straight away. So in the 90s street art was this complete dead zone, know, the heyday in the 80s with the real explosions in Philadelphia and New York and then internationally, Paris particularly. You know, in the 90s it was completely dead, all the street artists went off to be graphic designers and things or they went to jail.

Orlando Wood (06:46)
Right.

Right.

Ralph Taylor (06:59)
And then in the noughties, suddenly this kind of underground movement started that became a global phenomenon because people could share imagery like that and it would live forever. And that really became something that we noticed, well, certainly I noticed in my time at Sotheby’s and that became a groundswell that I felt was kind of irresistible and wanted to be a part of.

Orlando Wood (07:24)
Yeah, and it’s it also it it really developed a sort of robust print market as well, didn’t it? And even people like invader who, you know, his stuff would be at a certain place. And then you guys, think, Lazarides, you guys put it in resin so that they could kind of be sold on it. It really kind of on the one hand, it was the least commercial thing art almost never done.

Ralph Taylor (07:46)
Yeah.

Orlando Wood (07:47)
And

then on the flip side, was turned into one of the more commercial things that now seems to be the precursor to NFTs and things like that. This sort of, yeah.

Ralph Taylor (07:55)
Sure. I

mean that was a really interesting point about that, is about using kind of different production technologies to suit the ethos of the artist. So someone like Banksy was producing works on the street, but someone wanted to own something by him. He being an unreconstructed socialist, he was like, I don’t want to sell my art for loads of money. mean, the irony is not lost on me as we move forward 20 years.

Orlando Wood (08:21)
Right. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (08:23)
Certainly at the time he wanted to produce work that was very easy to access. So, you know, very large print editions of 750 at, you know, a couple hundred pounds, few hundred pounds, even when he became very successful. And so that kind of mass production was very important and has been really a kind of bedrock of the way his career has progressed. And same thing with Invader.

his work could not exist in the commercial sense that it does before the internet. And certainly not before computer games. So, you know, his alias, the space invader figure, which everyone’s familiar with from, you know, the original games in the 70s and 80s, you know, that image is about repetition, you know, and first couple of times he does it, it’s amazing.

and then it gets boring and then it goes through this kind of bell curve or upside down bell curve to suddenly be amazing again. And he has invaded, I think, 180 countries now. It’s a game for him. He’s trying to just put his pieces up everywhere. And there are rules for the game about how you can collect invaders, not as an art collector, but just sort of, know, taking notes of all of the works. But then if you want to buy one of the works,

Orlando Wood (09:16)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (09:41)
All of the invaders in the street is known as aliases because there’s always two. So there’s a work that’s done on say Manette Street in London, famous street that he did where we had our gallery. And that exact mosaic is reproduced and cased in a perspex box, in a perspex sort of block. And on the block is inscribed where it is, its alias number, how many points you get for it, and a certificate of authenticity as a kind of a Polaroid in there.

Orlando Wood (09:45)
Right. Yeah.

Alright,

okay. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (10:11)
So they

always exist as a duo, but they have…

Orlando Wood (10:15)
So it’s

gamification meets for scarcity to create a secondary print market for a, what is really a street sculpture. Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (10:25)
Absolutely. And what is really a concept because you know he does

it with this with a certain type of cement this invader the the Mosaic is destroyed before you can jimmy it off the wall It’s just impossible to get these things off the wall and you see kind of half chiseled ones off in London You know, I walked past a couple today and so So, you know the whole point is that this is a It’s a concept that exists Pretty much online. It’s a little

Orlando Wood (10:37)
Right. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (10:51)
delight when you’re around things and walking around cities. And if you’re used to invader, you’ll see them everywhere. If you start kind of, you, you exactly, but any, but you know, he’s done, he’s done, I think he’s done North Korea, you know, and everything in between, you know, like every country. You’d still be there. So yeah, I think, you know, his, his method was, was crucial. You know, same thing, you know, we talk about,

Orlando Wood (10:58)
Yeah, it happens to me all the time. go, yeah, great, you know.

Yeah. I didn’t see that one, strangely.

Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (11:18)
the technological applications in all of this. Someone like JR, who’s become one of the best known artists of that movement. And Generation, know, he found a camera on the subway, on the metro in Paris. And he didn’t buy it, he just found it. And then he started taking photographs of his friends who were out putting works up and, you know,

Orlando Wood (11:25)
Yeah, I was just gonna bring him up actually, yeah.

Ralph Taylor (11:43)
artists like Zeus and several others in Paris. And how do you then create artworks using photography in that kind of street context? So blowing them up and pasting them on walls became the way they had to do it and became very sophisticated at it. But there was a big movement where he would have these photo booths where you could take your own photo and then they’d be pasted up on the

wall and everything else. There are so many different ways beyond just a canvas on an easel in the studio with various different oil paints to create art as part of that movement. I’m going to barely even scratch the surface, but JR is another good example.

Orlando Wood (12:22)
Well, JR as well sort of moves into social and content very easily. mean, a lot of his stop motion stuff gives a lot of those things a second life. And it seems, you know, the stop motion ones that he does sort of don’t feel like at any point they’re meant to be a single image. They’re sort of meant to be, you know, consumed solely for social media. And is that a

Ralph Taylor (12:43)
Mm-hmm.

Orlando Wood (12:44)
a marketing thing or is that sort part of the art itself?

Ralph Taylor (12:48)
Well, a bit of both. mean, JR’s the greatest marketing man, certainly for himself, that you’ll ever meet. I mean, he’s got a genius for it. He was very inspired by an Italian artist called BLU B-L-U. And BLU was this kind of, you know, ascetic genius who would sort of hide himself away in very obscure villages around Italy. And he would…

create, I know if you remember MTV from the 90s, the kind of free your mind adverts that used to pop up, you know, between videos, they were always bonkers. So he basically creates animations on walls, so he white washes a wall, paints something, and then he does a stop motion. And so, I mean, the burden, exactly, all the way through, they’re utterly extraordinary, I they’re quite disturbing, but they’re…

Orlando Wood (13:18)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And you see the sort of white trails behind it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Unbelievable.

Ralph Taylor (13:40)
They’re extraordinary,

and it’s that kind of absolute commitment to a different medium. And the fact that that artwork only exists as a video. So it’s kind of video art form, but in a very modern sense, it’s not a kind of DVD. It was designed for YouTube before YouTube was even a thing. So it’s, yeah, and that’s heavily influenced JR. BLU is kind of the artist’s artist.

Orlando Wood (14:00)
Yeah.

Yeah. And is he the artist’s artist because that’s not really a commercial endeavor. That’s just something he’s doing for the sake of the art. Of course, it’s getting his name further out there and those videos are incredibly impressive, but there doesn’t seem to be a commercial aspect to that. is the purity of that right?

Ralph Taylor (14:27)
He would do drawing studies

that we sold, but not a lot. And they were also quite disturbing, as I’ve said. So he wasn’t the sort of artist who had any great interest in generating cash. And to be honest with you, most of the street artists I’ve met, I don’t like that expression, street artists, most of the contemporary artists who…

Orlando Wood (14:42)
Right.

Ralph Taylor (14:56)
some of their work exists in the sort public domain on streets, on buildings, on whatever else. You know, really they, it’s not like they’re evangelists or sort of counter-cultural warriors to the death. mean, BLU is a little bit, I mean, I don’t know how he gets by, but really almost all of them, even the most commercially successful of them all, Banksy, dedicate their,

Orlando Wood (15:20)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (15:21)
their lives to creating the art and then they reinvest the funds into these projects because again, it’s not like sitting in a studio and having to buy a couple of square meters of French linen and a few tubes of oil paint every month. You have to travel, you have to get vast quantities of paint if you’re Connor Harrington.

Orlando Wood (15:38)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (15:43)
and permits and whatever else. It’s a huge project, then for a lot of them it’s about building a legacy outside of the traditional system.

Orlando Wood (15:55)
Yeah, you very quickly in there, you sort of, you you quickly defined what street art is not and why it’s a sort of inappropriate catch all term a bit. And it feels to me like, you know, street art was, it drove a lot of people into the art world. It, you know, it was very popular from a consumer’s perspective, but it feels like the art industry and individual artists have sort of run away from that term.

quite aggressively. It doesn’t seem like there’s been a new place where everybody has run to. It feels like street art, as limited as that expression may be, maybe they got tired of it or it was over-commercialized. What’s your feeling about that?

Ralph Taylor (16:36)
Yeah, well,

it is endlessly interesting to me because there’s so many contradictions involved in it. And because street art was a movement that was incredibly democratic, let’s say, kind of easy access, the point of street pieces in the same way as an advertising hoarding is to communicate a message.

instantly to the widest possible audience. That’s Banksy’s success, that he is able in an incredibly striking stencil with zero complexity by design to convey a powerful message, often humorously. So it’s that kind of ease of understanding that is absolutely central to street art.

You know, the double-edged sword of that is that it means it exists outside of the traditional art world because, you know, if it’s easy to understand, then you don’t need a critic to help it. So it kind of disenfranchises the traditional structure of the art world. And also, it’s very derivative. know, it’s visual puns. A lot of street art is about that. It’s kind of re-synthesizing imagery that are in the pop.

Orlando Wood (17:41)
Right.

Ralph Taylor (17:46)
popular sort of culture already. So you see a lot of people repurposing pop art, was also by its nature, Andy Warhol was repurposing front pages of newspapers showing car crashes, Coca-Cola bottles, celebrity portraits. So it was always a kind of reproduction and mass production.

And so the problem is if you then appropriate that and kind of resynthesize the imagery as Banksy did, great, but then, you know, because that’s appropriation built on appropriation. If you do it again, like someone like Mr. Brainwash, then it becomes banal and absurd. And if you do it again and again and again and again, you know, there’s a lot of kind of very, very derivative artists in this chain of

Orlando Wood (18:26)
Right, yeah.

Ralph Taylor (18:32)
of kind of self-reference. It’s kitsch and it’s boring and it’s not saying anything new. And the problem is, know, street art has a lot of unbelievable pioneers, individual voices and some genuinely great talent, but it’s quite a derivative environment, not least because it’s so popular. You everyone wants to have a go at it, fair enough. But, you know, only so many people will come up with an original concept or original application for a concept.

Orlando Wood (18:33)
It becomes kitsch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (18:58)
or method of execution or whatever else. you know, the first day I left, the first day I started at Bonhams, having left Lazarides and worked with a lot of these artists, Bonhams at the time was doing urban art sales, the kind of the uglier version of street art, urban art’s awful. And the first thing I did when I joined Bonhams was like, we will never do this sale again. Because every artist I knew, you know, the JRs, Conor Harrington’s Banksy’s these invaders of this world, you know, to a man,

Orlando Wood (18:58)
Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Ralph Taylor (19:26)
and women, mean, we can come up to this, mainly men,

Orlando Wood (19:29)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (19:30)
say, you know, I’m not a straight artist, I’m an artist. And I felt very strongly that, you know, if they’re good enough, put them in the context of contemporary art, which is my area. And if they’re not, let someone else deal with it. But, you know,

why shouldn’t Banksy be put next to Warhol and Gerhard Richter or something really conceptual, you know, in Alberto Bari or something like that? You know, there is no reason why not. They all form the fabric of

Orlando Wood (19:45)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (19:56)
very most influential and interesting work in the context.

Orlando Wood (20:01)
Right.

Can I ask what the differentiator is between urban art and street art?

Ralph Taylor (20:04)
There isn’t one, it’s just two different expressions for the same thing. Urban art implies being inspired by urban culture, which is kind of a catch-all. It’s very clunky pigeonholing, because it’s very hard to come up with a concept. Graffiti art is where this all started from, and it was done on the street, also on…

Orlando Wood (20:06)
Right. Right.

Ralph Taylor (20:31)
subway cars and whatever else. And it was part of the tripod in the 70s, late 60s, 70s and 80s of hip hop music, break dancing and graffiti. And so, you know, the urban catchall is this kind of, I think, slightly pejorative expression that’s kind of morphed out of that. You know, the street art side of it is more accurate, it’s kind of a descriptive, but again.

It’s not, I don’t think they’ve got much value either of those times.

Orlando Wood (21:03)
How did, so when you move back to Bonhams and sort of back in the world of, of kind of sales and curation and things like that, how did your relationship to artists change?

Ralph Taylor (21:14)
Well, I went from being the person who is trying to discover young artists, develop them, certainly encourage and invest in them, bring them to a wider audience, be their champion, their shoulder to cry on, take them out when they were feeling happy, take them out when they were feeling sad, you know, all of that good stuff. And then went to the guy who was, you know, selling their…

Orlando Wood (21:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (21:42)
their heart’s blood that they had let out into the world, reselling it. So in terms of the artists I knew, I had to be very sensitive because work comes up at auction and if it sells for a huge amount of money, that’s a disaster because suddenly everyone who bought a piece understandably will say, oh wow, I bought that piece for 10,000 and it’s worth 100, come on. But it’s not a share certificate, it’s a work of art that was produced.

Orlando Wood (22:05)
Right. Right.

Ralph Taylor (22:10)
Artists need to understand that once they release a work from the studio, legitimately from the studio, not a kind of study piece or a student work or whatever, but a mature artwork that they get paid for, they’re notwithstanding certain restrictions. That’s now out in the ecosystem and it can change hands and that’s OK. But so long as you’re ultra sensitive about

how you handle an artwork. And if an artist isn’t particularly known in the secondary market or it’s the first time his work or her work has ever appeared at auction, they’re not just putting it as lot number 312 at the back of a mid-season sale without any content. I mean, that is a catastrophe and that is frankly cultural vandalism. So first time I offered a work by Connor Harrington, who I worked very closely with, I…

It was about a year into my time at Bonhams and I felt that the interest in Connor’s work was such that some of his pieces would appear at auction and there would be an audience for it. And once that’s happened, you can’t control it. So I said to him, what I’ll do, I’ll put you as the first lot in a sale and we’ll have a big interview with it. Talk about you and your influences, a lot of studio photos like it’s a sort of a feature in GQ magazine.

is kind of what we did. And you know, it sold really well. And then you’re out into the world and I can carry on being as sensitive as I possibly can, but you know, the guys at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips and others, you can’t control how they’re gonna behave. that was a big change in terms of my relationship with artists.

Orlando Wood (23:51)
And so is the prevailing feeling that very often they feel left out of that secondary market? Because I think that, you know, as a passive observer, one thinks, Connor Harrington from, you know, the Weekend Warrior series has sold for a million quid. That can only be good for Connor, really. Is that, but then maybe the market goes, well, no, actually, it’s really only that show that that is valuable and everything else isn’t.

I don’t mean to pick on Connor necessarily, but yeah.

Ralph Taylor (24:16)
No, no, no, for sure. mean, well, Connor is one of the greats. And, you know, if his works were selling

for a million, that would be fantastic. And the thing about Connor is that his work is so detailed that it’s very hard for him to produce sufficient work for his market to flood or to be exposed too much to that kind of thing. know, a good example, because Banksy is this kind of real, you know, anti-capitalist flag waiver.

You know, he gets a lot of criticism saying, you your work just sold for six million or whatever it was, five million a couple of nights ago here in London. He gets what’s called artist resale right in the UK and Europe. It’s not applicable in America. It’s effectively a royalty when an artwork changes hands. But it’s capped at about 14,000 euros. It’s always calculated in euros. I do not know why, but it is.

Orlando Wood (25:02)
Right, yeah.

Right,

Ralph Taylor (25:08)
So what is that? That’s about $14,000.

Orlando Wood (25:08)
right. And that’s true on any art sold in the UK or in Europe. okay, right, okay. Right, okay. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (25:13)
Yeah, secondary market, so not the first time it’s sold. So there is a royalty, but you could sell

for 500 million.

dollars or pounds and you’re selling it 14,000. And you know, that’s fine. No one’s going to cry for Banksy, but it’s not, you know, the perception is that he’s suddenly coining it in on all of this kind of stuff and that the artists are, they do get a small royalty, but it’s somewhat out of their hands. Whether or

Orlando Wood (25:20)
and you still only get 14,000 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (25:37)
you know, a work can only make that kind of money if it’s from a certain period or a certain medium is

true.

Orlando Wood (25:44)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (25:44)
Yeah,

that’s a broader topic, I guess.

Orlando Wood (25:46)
Well, that brings me into something I wanted to talk about, because obviously, you know, such a big part of this podcast is supposed to be about tech and its impact on creativity and creative industries, particularly, industries and companies that rely on creativity, how they might use kind of these new technologies. And there’s been huge shifts from, you know, obviously,

well, you know, from as far back as you know, the internet and blogs, and then, you know, as we said, social media, that now we’re getting into blockchain and AI and things like mid journey and all those sorts of things. You know, I would imagine and we haven’t spoken about this, but the NFT craze in the art world. Yeah, exactly. I would imagine that that was just met with a massive eye roll.

Ralph Taylor (26:26)
here it comes.

Orlando Wood (26:33)
from the art community. And I’m just wondering, A, is that true? And B, is there any sort of, know, because obviously, baked into the smart contract of an NFT, there can be this ongoing sale royalty where you say, no, no, no, this person agrees that on future sale, the original artist can get 10 % of any, you know, any future secondary market sale.

you know, is that a potential technology that when teamed up with something physical that is fungible that, I’m sure these conversations are happening. I’m just, yeah.

Ralph Taylor (27:01)
Yeah, I mean,

such an interesting topic because there’s a kind of top layer that is very derisory and I’m certainly not immune to that. But then there’s a kind of, you strip away and you say, okay, is there something meaningful at the heart of this? And certainly I think as relates the kind of interface with technology and fine art and it’s of a painting just for the, I mean,

limitless,

limitless ways to produce art but you know let’s say traditional painting. The idea of the NFT as being a kind of soul of an artwork was a very interesting idea.

Orlando Wood (27:43)
or

certificate of authenticity you know yeah

Ralph Taylor (27:44)
Precisely. the way of authenticating, I

authenticating an artwork because you know, it’s that kind of, it’s that, voodoo, the excitement of the signature on the work. know, it’s the authorship that makes someone really excited. know, I’ve seen hundreds of beautiful fake Picasso’s in my

But.

it’s the signature and knowing it’s authentic that gives you that little thrill. And that may seem ridiculous, I think actually knowing that it falls within the career and within the kind of trajectory of one of the greatest creatives there’s ever been is very exciting. But that kind of excitement around authorship and authenticity.

Orlando Wood (28:10)
Yeah.

you

Ralph Taylor (28:27)
is the absolute bedrock of the art market. Absolutely nothing happens without authenticity. And so when you have NFTs come in, you see the bored apes and the kind of just ridiculous projects on the one hand, but then you see these kind of very interesting, almost as a cryptocurrency equivalent.

Orlando Wood (28:30)
Yeah. Right.

Ralph Taylor (28:49)
You see the way the artists are engaging with a different audience, fractionalization is very interesting, using the blockchain in terms of authentication and future prerogatives when handing things over in terms of royalty and remittance and everything like that. It is really interesting. And ultimately, I think it’s that kind of blockchain element to the art that is fascinating and I think has the most potential. mean, there was a peak when everyone was thinking,

Orlando Wood (28:53)
Right.

Ralph Taylor (29:15)
you know, is this the thing I need to jump on? And you know, there’s no surprise that it coincided with, you know, lockdown and whatever else that it really spiked. But you know, there is a lot within the NFT space that I think is really fascinating and just about why someone would want to own something. mean, you one of the first NFTs that was produced was about

Orlando Wood (29:18)
Right.

Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (29:39)
best dunks in the NBA. So the NBA was selling NFTs of great plays. So Shaq does an amazing dunk or LeBron or whoever else, but that sounds very British saying those names. But a really great thing, you’re the NFT, you’re the guy, you own it. Now I can go on YouTube and I can watch that clip a billion times over. I can save it and put it as a screensaver on my laptop. So where’s the ownership thing? And for a certain person with a degree of wealth,

Orlando Wood (29:51)
Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (30:07)
in this case in crypto, in other cases in fiat or cash, it’s the ability to say, but I own it. And it reminds me of David Bowie’s collection came up to auction, sadly not at Bonhams, a few years ago, and I’m big David Bowie nut. And I had a friend who bought David Bowie’s sound system that he used in his house.

Orlando Wood (30:29)
Right.

Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (30:31)
it was a kind of top of the range, beautiful, um, hi-fi or whatever, you know, whatever it was, but that kind of thing, you know, that probably had a retail price of 10, 15,000 pounds, dollars, whatever. Um, and it was used. So, but he ended up spending half a million on it and he was just like,

I own it. And also I get to play my records on a David Bowie’s record player. And so there is an element that, know, is that kind of

Orlando Wood (30:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ralph Taylor (31:00)
base level art ownership and also that kind of,

Orlando Wood (31:04)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (31:04)
you know, the link to the artist or the creative in that sense or the previous owner that I think is relevant in NFTs and which is why they shouldn’t be completely disregarded.

Orlando Wood (31:15)
Yeah, because I think that using it as a secondary authentication mechanism for you know, because obviously, when you buy a piece of art, you get that authentication with the the fingerprint of the the person who sells it to you’re the gallery owner or something like that. You know, and so that that is a sort of companion piece, even Pictures On Walls When you know, when I was kind of selling a Banksy, I had clearly lost the certificate and I had to go through rounds of Pictures on Walls and take certain

things and that that work is slow and stressful and and really there’s an argument to be made that what you’re really selling is the certificate you’re selling the authenticity that thing outside the art that proves that that thing is real. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (31:53)
100 % I mean without a certificate

most works are worthless

Orlando Wood (31:58)
Yeah, yeah.

And and as well that the the monetary linking of you know, through blockchain or NFT to that certificate means that when it changes hands, you can create a smart contract that automatically remunerates the author whenever that changes hands.

Ralph Taylor (32:16)
% it just and you see this with a lot of particularly younger galleries who are kind of adopting this process at the outset, you know, if you’re a really established gallery who’s been active, you know for 20, 30 years with you know 15 outlets and whatever else to try and introduce this is just I

a Herculean task. Whereas if you’re just starting out then

Orlando Wood (32:38)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (32:41)
of when you get a certificate so, know, I buy young works by young.

occasionally and you get the certificate but you also get the kind of the the blockchain certificate as well

and you know so it’s almost like this is becoming the norm. Ultimately I kind of assumed it would be it would be universally adopted sooner but I think it’s just that barrier to entry is if you do it everyone has to do it and so you kind of almost have to build up enough weight pushing against that closed door for it to just burst through which I do expect to happen.

Orlando Wood (32:51)
Yeah.

Yeah, because I think that the other thing is that as as the capability to create so many of these things becomes democratized in different ways, the the value of the real thing diminishes as well. For example, I was speaking to somebody who was an expert in handbags and the resale value of handbags and whatever else and they said, Chanel has stopped authenticating bags, their own bags, because the the

Ralph Taylor (33:36)
Right.

Orlando Wood (33:38)
quality was so good of the that they were running into an issue where they were authenticating it as real found out then it and That actually they said that they were sort of loosely thinking about some sort of digital authentication system because It’s it’s hurting the just the ability of their bags to maintain value

Ralph Taylor (33:59)
You know, it is and actually handbags, know, such a growth area in the secondary market. So in auction land, you look at auction houses like Bonhams, know, you know, 10 years ago, we wouldn’t sell a single handbag. Now we sell thousands of handbags a year. But the thing is, if the secondary market in handbags is unreliable because, you know, Chanel is not authenticating, then it does present a problem. There needs to be a solution. Now, the thing about Chanel is because in theory, their product

Orlando Wood (34:04)
Hmm.

Ralph Taylor (34:27)
production line is unlimited. mean, in practice, it’s of course, not, it’s not practically unlimited and also they wouldn’t want it to be, but you know, for them, they’re kind of the resale opportunity is not so interesting. It’s that first point of sale, first transaction that’s important, but you know, with art, because the whole point is that it’s, you know, anyone who buys an artwork, even if it’s a print for 50 pounds, you know, you are only ever a steward for that piece. And so it,

you know, whilst a handbag, it’s like when you buy it, you buy it from a certified Chanel dealer or shop or whatever, and you get all your kind of certificates and whatever else. That’s great, but that’s to reassure you at the first point of sale. All of that stuff that you get when you’re buying an artwork is really about when you decide to sell it or your child or partner or great, great, great, great, great grandchild decides to sell it. So.

Orlando Wood (35:14)
Bye.

Ralph Taylor (35:21)
That distinction is important and again, it of reiterates why the authenticity and that opportunity within the blockchain again, it’s going to be so interesting, not least with AI around. And there are kind of various, very peculiar forays into AI. Christie’s is running a project on AI-generated arts. At the moment, I think really just to say in the same way that five years ago, people were kind of going, well, let’s do an NFT sale because why not?

Orlando Wood (35:45)
Right.

Right. Money’s moving, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (35:51)
We don’t get it, but someone does. Exactly, someone wants it and we’re facilitators. think that’s what’s happening

now. We saw the first AI-generated artwork a few years ago and it was a fun thing. now they’re becoming quite serious. There’s sort of things that you see on teenage boys’ bedrooms back in the 80s. It sort of bucks them aliens and stuff. Not this teenage boy.

Orlando Wood (36:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, right. Surely not me either.

Ralph Taylor (36:18)
Green. Actually, I wasn’t a teenager in the 80s, but you know,

they’re pretty weird. They’re pretty niche. But that’s going to go one way. This is just the latest iteration of artists sending over paintings or designs, sorry, high resolution images that they’ve designed to China to a workshop to get someone to paint it for 10,000 and then they send it back. I mean, that’s been happening for ages.

Orlando Wood (36:43)
Interesting.

Ralph Taylor (36:43)
Camera Obscura, which is a kind of slightly random technique that someone like David Hockney was using that was a big part of the Renaissance, know, 500 years ago, was a way of being able to effectively trace using light and a kind of…

Orlando Wood (36:58)
Yeah, and everybody

considered that that fakery. That was, you know, if you use that, you were a charlatan. Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (37:01)
Exactly. mean, that was absolutely outrageous. Absolutely. you know, speaking of David Hockney,

I mean, he was the one who, you know, had a license with Photoshop in which I had to realize until recently was actually invented in the late 1980s. I mean, as soon as it came out, he was playing around with it. you know, artists can either embrace it and do something meaningful with it or they can just exploit the opportunity that it provides. you know, part of that is in that kind of very esoteric, very empirical

Orlando Wood (37:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (37:31)
hard to pin down why is something valuable, why is an artist more important than another one? And that feeds into that kind of value judgment as much as anything else.

Orlando Wood (37:36)
Yeah.

we’ve sort of seen it all the time. when Photoshop sort of first came out and photographers were using it, I know my mom being a photographer, she was very against it. And of course now,

Ralph Taylor (37:52)
course.

Orlando Wood (37:58)
Photoshop kind of touches just about everything that comes out of a camera. And nobody is crying for the enlarging rooms and the dark rooms that you used to be able to find in cities all over the place, you know, and the people who owned them when Photoshop happened and when things became digitized, when 35 millimeter film stopped being the medium everybody was using.

Ralph Taylor (38:10)
Mmm.

Orlando Wood (38:20)
dark rooms across New York and across London and everywhere closed. And it wasn’t highly publicized, but it was a reality. And so it’s interesting, you’re right, the camera obscura, and there were all these things that have always been pointed at as, that’s the new thing, it’s inherently wrong, it means you’re a charlatan if you use it, and then it becomes the norm.

Ralph Taylor (38:35)
Yeah.

Absolutely, mean, you know, the printing press obviously, the sort of seismic impact of that, but we won’t get into that. you know, over 100 years ago, just over 100 years ago, people like Clement Greenberg talking about the reproduction of photography and it being, you know, this crisis of confidence in the art business. If an image can be recreated from scratch, some photorealist painting, which have made up pretty much 90 % of

of art practice since the 1400s, we’re suddenly under threat. And so these kind of seismic impacts, and really it is a change of medium. 1960, suddenly acrylic paint comes along. And from a technological perspective, it dries quicker, it dries flatter, you can do very different things than you can with oil paint.

And you know people thought that maybe you know oil paint would become redundant. Of course it doesn’t. And then you know all these different techniques that come to come to pass. You know in the printing manner as well you know you’ve moved on from things needed to be screen printed and know color lithograph and stuff into this kind of very highly digital inkjet print which used to be something that you need to know well that’s just you know control P.

It’s not anymore. Now, the quality of it is such that it’s, you know, it’s kind of elevated to a higher art, you know,

Orlando Wood (39:56)
Yeah. Right.

Right. I have two more questions. Well, you also have the distinction of you get to actually be the auctioneer at the auctions for 20th and 21st century art.

Ralph Taylor (40:12)
Yes.

Orlando Wood (40:16)
Tell me about that. mean, I don’t even really have a good question about it because I’m so in the dark as to how that works. I imagine that it’s built on a lot of charm and chutzpah. What is it? Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (40:28)
Well, it’s professional showing off and winging it is

kind of how I would describe it. I mean, it’s one of those things where when you do it the first time, not to kind of really pull the curtain back on the great Oz too much, there’s not a lot of kind of really juicy technical stuff that goes behind it. I don’t want to undersell auctioneering, but basically if you have

Orlando Wood (40:52)
Right.

Ralph Taylor (40:55)
the trick in your mind where you can kind of talk whilst being able to keep the ticker tape going on in your brain about where the number should be. Then it’s about whether you have the confidence and the willingness and the brazenness to kind of get up there. And you don’t really know until you try. I mean, I’m not particularly mathematically minded, but just for whatever reason, I can do that.

as an auctioneer, I’m standing on the rostrum, I’ve got a screen in front of me and it shows me what’s coming up, what the

is.

Orlando Wood (41:29)
a

Ralph Taylor (41:29)
So I can see what on this lot, lot number one, I can see what the estimate is, what the reserve is, what the absentee bids are, if there are any, the people have left, how many phone lines are gonna be active on that lot. So I’ll say, okay, there are seven phone lines. I will have done my preparation in advance, as you would expect.

So I’ll know which of my colleagues are going to be on the phone to people who can’t be in the room. I’ll also be pretty sure who in the room is going to be there. But then I’ve got a screen as well which shows the online bidding. And so it’ll flash up if someone’s bidding online. And that’s kind of the feed going to the camera pointing at me that people watch remotely. I’ll then have a couple of colleagues next to me clarking. So they’ll have…

they’ll be just making sure that nothing goes wrong and changing the increments so that you, when looking at the screen, can see it’s 100, 110,000,

you know.

Orlando Wood (42:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (42:19)
And they have aggregators, which are kind of third party websites which can channel bids our way. So there’s all sorts of weird stuff going on. It’s like, this is probably wasted on you, but I know that you are technically actually

So driving a manual car,

Orlando Wood (42:34)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (42:37)
or a stick shift as you’d call it. The first time you drive,

you drive one of those, you’ve got three pedals, you’ve got steering wheel, you’ve got the gear stick and you’ve got cars coming at you, you know, you’ve got music playing probably, you’ve got people in the background, mirrors, everything. It’s like, oh my God, what is going on? It’s too much to think about. But then when you’ve been doing for a while, it’s just normal. Auctioneering is exactly the same as that.

Orlando Wood (42:49)
Yeah.

Yeah, it goes from doing

a million things to doing one thing quite quickly. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (43:03)
Exactly, you’d

and and you know, like so many of these things you don’t really think about it But you know our ability to in all it’s to harness that kind of technical application Has revolutionized auction houses is why you know auction houses are so powerful in the art world and you know They were basically the end of the line in up until you know 20 odd years ago where Dealers would try and sell something at an art fair a couple of times.

if they couldn’t sell something or someone died and their estate needed to come up, that’s when they come to auction. Now it’s much more of a transactional, much more of a kind of saturated calendar and market. and absolutely global. And so, we used to call it an evening sale and it is an evening somewhere, but

Orlando Wood (43:43)
and global every time. Yeah, yeah.

Ralph Taylor (43:49)
one of the biggest shifts has been the kind of global nature of the audience that we’re dealing with and our ability to do business at all times and again, kind of referring back to the pandemic and the influence it had, we were able to carry on doing business when dealers couldn’t go to art fairs or galleries couldn’t go to art fairs.

Orlando Wood (44:06)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (44:07)
they weren’t open, had to rely on a very narrow funnel, which was their website.

Orlando Wood (44:11)
And did you find you took a step up in your technology to handle that additional capability? Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (44:15)
absolutely. Absolutely. So we had to do this thing

called hybrid sales where, we had to really accelerate our our ability, the the the ability for our platform to

to be able to accommodate that level of international bidding and everything that goes on with it. you know, the investment that we’ve made in our website, certainly, and the language facilities, the various different bidding platforms, the app, you know, the fact that you can bid just as easily through the app as anything else has turned us from

you know, being a $200 million turnover a year plus our car department to a billion dollar a year plus our car department. you know, it’s been absolutely integral to our ability to scale.

Orlando Wood (44:58)
Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, it seems incredibly fun. mean, just watching it from the outside, seems like a fun thing to be doing.

Ralph Taylor (45:08)
It is well if the auction is going well, it’s fun if it’s going badly. It’s absolutely excruciating But

you know the trick is not to let people know

You know, the showmanship.

Orlando Wood (45:18)
the sport of it. So yeah, I’m one of questions I’ve been asking is I had a boss once named Dan Wieden, who, you know, he started a huge huge advertising agency he had this great quote where he said, you’re useless to me until you’ve failed at least twice.

Ralph Taylor (45:33)
Okay.

Orlando Wood (45:34)
would you mind sort of mentioning if you can remember or if you’re willing to admit any time that you’ve failed big and then what you learned from it.

Ralph Taylor (45:43)
yes, interesting. I’m to try and just come up with one off my head. I mean, there are so many examples of Orlando. mean, hundreds of examples just from today. so a good one is from the Lazarides days. we, we did this project. we took on these drainage tunnels, these huge, great tunnels.

Orlando Wood (45:49)
No. Right. Right.

Right.

yeah,

yeah. The Old Vic tunnels. Yeah, right.

Ralph Taylor (46:07)
which I think you would have attempted. Old big tunnels,

And we took these tunnels on like four or five square acres or hectares or whatever.

anyway, a big space. You know, quite derelict. Vast great tunnel, very high ceilings, you very damp.

were very macabre, think Jack the Ripper style, but a kind of really atmospheric and extraordinary place to show art. And so we did that a few times. And so when you say fail big, I think we did it four times. So we fell big four times. But we carried on doing it and losing a lot of money.

Orlando Wood (46:26)
Yeah.

Right?

Ralph Taylor (46:43)
partly because our costs on it was so big and the average price of what we were selling was maybe 5,000, 10,000 pounds at the time and our

Orlando Wood (46:50)
Right.

Ralph Taylor (46:51)
on that was 50 % after discount and whatever else. You’re making, let’s say, two or 3,000 pounds per transaction. If you’re spending a couple of hundred thousand out of pocket on the project,

and you don’t have enough paintings in there to break even, you’re going to

pretty spectacularly. Now we kind of went into that with our eyes wide open, but the financial failure was pretty astonishing, particularly after the fourth time or maybe the third time.

Orlando Wood (47:08)
Yeah. Right.

Ralph Taylor (47:21)
I think, you know, that kind of Wayne’s World thing. We just thought if we build it, they will come. And in the end, commercially, it wasn’t a success, but brand-wise, reputationally for the artists and for us, it was a huge success in the sense that

Orlando Wood (47:26)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (47:36)
When we were licking our wounds financially in the aftermath, you look at the volume of… Something like 50,000 people came through an art exhibit that wasn’t a museum in some random tunnels in quite a scary… The access point was an underpass full of graffiti in a slightly salubrious part of London. So having tens of thousands of people come through, particularly on the opening night, which was bonkers…

The quality of art buyer and, you know, it’s really influential advisors, museum acquisitions committee members, curators and things like that that came through. You know, what we we learned from it in the end was actually the financially, yes, it was a disaster, but we’ve been reaping the benefits ever since. Certainly, you know, even

over well over a decade beyond in my time at Bonhams, the relationships that we created and the associations that we made. And certainly for me, that experience of going to the wall, pretty much financially, you know, about actually facing up to the worst case, almost the worst case scenario, because, know, ultimately we rode it out, but that…

Orlando Wood (48:41)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (48:51)
experiencing that kind of financial peril, not because you would put a million pounds on red in the roulette table, but you’d done something meaningful and earnest and there’s a real cultural investment in artists and the community and everything else, and you’d lost a lot of money. The benefits were great long-term, but actually learning through adversity and the actually…

Orlando Wood (48:55)
Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (49:18)
the almost worst case scenario looks bad, but if you look at it from a different angle, it’s trite thing to say so, but it definitely taught me that, you you can take a few lumps and you’ll come out stronger. we didn’t learn from our mistakes in that sense, but, you know, everything we did and all the success that we had was based on that willingness to be bold. And I think, you know, we learned that actually net-net,

Orlando Wood (49:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (49:43)
You know, it’s worth not dying wondering, know, really giving it a whirl and being ambitious and hungry and aggressive in those kind of things, because, you know, you can’t take it with you.

Orlando Wood (49:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

And it was the most audacious thing anybody was doing in London at the time, you know, and that alone is to be commended. And commended four times, well done.

Ralph Taylor (50:05)
Yeah, I mean,

you know, yeah, it was silly, but the time, you know, it was when Freeze Art Fair was really coming into its pomp. you know, Steve, with his kind of man of the people hat on, you know, you used get very worked up, the idea that, you know, if you’re a civilian going to Freeze, you have to pay to get a ticket to go in and see some art, which is for sale. And he…

Orlando Wood (50:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Right, right. Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (50:27)
It didn’t bother me at the time, but looking back on it, I kind of really understand where he’s coming from. He was like, you don’t charge someone 10 pounds to go into, you know, urban outfits as to buy a pair of jeans. You know, this is utterly insane. So he was like, right, we’re not gonna change, I’m not gonna charge, and not only are we not going to charge, we’re going to, you know, fund all the artists up front and do all this kind of crazy stuff and make it a kind of, you know, carnival.

Orlando Wood (50:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (50:52)
within there and you know, the fact that we’re talking about this now, no one is talking about anyone’s Frieze exhibition back in 2010 or 11 now, but everyone still remembers those projects and you know, something that I’m proud of and look back on fondly.

Orlando Wood (51:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And just one last question. What do you think defines the art, you know, the art world now? mean, if everybody, you know, one of the things I said earlier was it seems like the art world sort of ran away from street art or at least the term and didn’t sort of pick a place to go to necessarily. Is there something that you think defines the art community now or the state the art world finds itself in?

Ralph Taylor (51:40)
Well, mean, art that’s being produced right now, I mean, there are different sort of definitions of what the art world is, but a kind of a general theme within the art world right now would be that it’s really a mirror up to society. And the more mirrors you can hold up, the more artists who are active, the more of a kind of an authentic, legitimate reflection you get. mean, you know, many…

exhibitions and a lot of talk and ink have been placed on the fact that the mirrors that were up to society up until relatively recently were quite narrow, you know, being the kind of what are now known as the dead white men artists and that kind of having more voices and things. the fact that there are infinitely more voices or more mirrors being held up to society gives a much more interesting and rounded

reflection, that’s something that pervades art schools, galleries in the artists that they’re taking on, museums in who they choose to exhibit, and then all of that has an impact on value. If an artist has a big exhibition announced by Tate Modern Mid-Career Retrospective, that artist’s work is suddenly appreciably more valuable. so that kind of repositioning is really the most

Orlando Wood (52:43)
Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (52:59)
prevalent characteristics, changed evolution that’s happening in the art world. In terms of what movements are happening, was this much derided, well, much derided now, this announcement of the death of painting about 10 or so years ago, that has gone into reverse gear without prejudice. yeah, painting’s very much back on top and…

Orlando Wood (53:14)
Right.

Ralph Taylor (53:23)
It’s understandable. If someone was to buy something valuable, buying an installation or a video art or whatever else is fine, but buying a meter square canvas is a lot easier, so it’s really no surprise. Paintings back in, but movements come and go. Suddenly Warhol was on the down and down a few years ago. Suddenly Warhol’s back on the up and up. Same with Picasso.

Orlando Wood (53:32)
Yeah.

Really? Right.

Yeah.

Ralph Taylor (53:47)
So these

kind of cycles within the market are fascinating to see and how volatile and how quickly they fluctuate. But there are general trends, but there really aren’t any movements.

that explosion of artistic movements from the early 20th century to the early 21st century, that street art really is the bookend. I’m not saying that we won’t see anything new soon, but certainly there hasn’t been anything with that coherence since the mid-Noughties when street art came around.

Orlando Wood (54:15)
Right. Dude, this was awesome. Thank you so much for chatting with me and giving me or giving us so much of your time. It’s very cool of you. And this was really fun. I just really enjoyed it. So thank you.

Ralph Taylor (54:21)
My pleasure.

Hush up.

Well, me too. I really enjoyed it and I’m

honoured to have been asked. So thank you for having me and we’ll speak again soon.

Orlando Wood (54:37)
That’d be great. Thanks so much, man. Have a good

Ralph Taylor (54:39)
No worries, bye.

Orlando (54:45)
Well, that was fun getting to speak to Ralph Taylor, the head of contemporary art at Bonhams, one of the largest auction houses in the world. We spoke about a lot of things pertaining to the art world and technological innovation. We touched on their massive tech overhaul of their auctioneering business as a response to COVID, where they went from being a 250 million pound business to a billion pound business in those two years. We also addressed some of the ways that NFTs might provide a way for galleries to authenticate works.

as well as the ability for smart contracts on the blockchain to give artists a participation in their future secondary market sales. AI is getting a lot of the press recently. And I think it’s interesting that AI’s ability to make realistic art and videos came out nearly at the same time as a potential digital encrypted authentication mechanism in the blockchain. I also really enjoyed his summary of some of the key moments of technological innovation in the art world historically.

and the degrees to which each was heralded as the end of creativity from camera obscura to Photoshop. And yet creativity has never been a bigger part of people’s daily lives. I’m always encouraged by the masses of content being created every day. It’s not all great. This might be a great example of that. But there are more lighting kits and professional cameras in more homes around the world being used for creativity than ever before.

And I think we need to be careful not to be snobs about what creativity is and isn’t. Art has shown us that what started as graffiti and vandalism was labeled as creatively abhorrent and spawned the last true artistic movement in street art. You know, I’m interested to see what creatives and artists worldwide are going to do in the face of these technologies and with these technologies. And I guess we’ll have to just wait and see. There’s kind of no other option.

So anyway, if you made it this far, thank you so much for listening and I hope you’ll join us again.