Adam Neate, or when 1,000 paintings “took to the streets”

Imagine that one day, walking down the street, you come across a painting by a famous artist. You like art, so you're stunned, because you know that the painting you're looking at in the alley next to your house is an artwork worth thousands of euros. What would you do? Would you take it? Well, it was the painter himself, Adam Neate, who did exactly this in London to give his paintings away. More than 1,000 paintings, to be precise, appeared at different spots around the city. But what were Neate's reasons for handing over part of his popular art, just like that?

“For some people my paintings won't be worth anything,” Adam Neate admitted in an interview

His story is that of so many artists who came out of nowhere, who nobody was betting on and who ended up becoming well-known painters as time went by. Adam Neate was born in Essex and moved to London in his youth. From a very early age he was drawn to urban art and although he didn't study painting he did have training in the arts, in design to be exact. That's how he started out as a graphic designer in London.

In fact, painting was “an accident” in his career, since he's really considered a conceptual artist, and good proof of that is the fact of giving away those 1,000 paintings which, by the way, had been painted on pieces of cardboard. He himself has said that he could make up to 20 paintings in a single night and that over 5 years he produced as many as 5,000 paintings.

It wasn't until 2007 that he started exhibiting, but a year later he made his first conceptual artwork out in the street: he gave away 1,000 copies worth a total of 1 million euros. The aim? “To challenge the notion of art as a commodity and its value in society. Now I'm taking that to another level.”

How much is a Vincent Van Gogh worth, or is it the eye of whoever is looking?

Neate is an artist who has explored countless fields over his long career, but he isn't the only one who, at some point, has wanted to nod to his predecessors in the face of the smugness of the art business. Because if art experts didn't exist, how much would that painting now considered a masterpiece really be worth? This action he carried out in London had a curious effect: the very next day there were already paintings of his up for sale on Ebay. The price? It ranged from 1,000 pounds ...to 99 cents! In other words, whoever knew the potential value that artwork had for gallerists offered those paintings at the price they'd been assigned, but whoever knew nothing about Neate gave them a different value. For some, that painting on cardboard wasn't worth more than a few pounds. Neate's aim was a great success and, in fact, he far exceeded his goal of getting people to take part in the action. Once again he managed to make us understand that the art business is very different from art itself and from how we each value it.