🔥 When Art Becomes Merch + Wes Lang

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HEY Y’ALL!

Thanks for all the great feedback on the Stik piece I shared last day!

🔥 ICYMI – Catchs from the Last Weeks:

1. Cristina Banban, Mariana, 2020 - priced at £24,000

2. Rebecca Ness, Drawing Party, 2020 - priced at £45,000

3. Yoshitomo Nara, Girl in a Box, 2001 - priced at £22.500

Today we have Wes Lang - Buddha meets biker at £22k. Plus: when Murakami becomes merch, exit immediately.

-Today’s Catch-

Wes Lang

💭 My 2 Cents: Lang’s skulls still freak out polite dinner-party collectors and that’s half the fun. Be Yourself nails his cowboy-Buddha vibe pre-Kanye era, minus the merch hype, so you’re buying the DNA without the tourist traffic. I love the stripped-back palette; it reads like a one-liner and a gut punch. At £22k you’re paying used-Tesla money for a canvas that predates his MoMA acquisition and the Hirst machine, which feels slightly mispriced in 2025’s frothy mid-market.

🔑 Key Numbers: Mid-size Lang paintings from 2009-11 hammered at $40-65k last year, and the 2017 record sits at $252k; supply spike from the 2024 Black Paintings hasn’t dragged early works (only 3 sub-2012 canvases hit auction in 24 months). 24×20 inches means easy shipping, cheap reframing, and wall-space friendly. Dealer markup on similar primary inventory now hovers at £30-35k, so there’s a 25% spread.

🧠 Why It’s a Smart Pick: Early series provenance, digestible price, liquidity via both biker-lux fans and new HENI crowd, with limited downside outside a total Lang market stall.

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-In a Minute-

🔥 Words I Like: brandwashing, meme-churn, collector bait

Logo Trade Fatigue

Lately, I’ve been seeing the same painting on three very different walls: a white cube in Chelsea, an airport Louis Vuitton store, and some guy’s Instagram story tagged “#artcollector.”

The painting? A giant Murakami flower face. Cute, round, and absolutely everywhere.

This is what happens when visual memes go corporate. First, the artist becomes a brand. Then the brand becomes a capsule. Then the artwork becomes noise.
I’m not surprised. We’ve seen it before; Kusama pumpkins, Indiana’s LOVE, even Warhol’s soup cans if you go back far enough.

The pattern is clean: something visually punchy gets picked up by luxury, amplified by influencers, rinsed by fast fashion, and finally dumped onto auction catalogs once the thrill wears off.

Collectors pretend they’re buying “cultural relevance.” What they’re really buying is future liquidation risk wrapped in shiny marketing.
Murakami is already deep into its third commercial cycle. Hublot did it. Louis Vuitton revived it. Zendaya posted it.
That was your sell signal. Not because Zendaya’s bad, but because once the meme hits mass exposure, the scarcity illusion breaks.

What comes next? Probably Julie Curtiss’s hair loops. Or Pantone’s glitch gradients. The branding teams are already lining up.
These aren’t bad artists. But when you start seeing their motifs on makeup bags or limited-edition sneakers, just know someone’s cashing out while you're buying the leftovers.

At this point, I can scroll through Artsy listings and predict which visual motifs are going to get “lifestyled” next.

I'm not talking here about quality. It’s about recognizability. And once recognizability becomes oversaturation, good luck reselling.

Collectors who confuse Instagram virality with long-term value are the real targets of these campaigns. The artists get their checks. The brands get their cultural halo. The buyers get a sculpture that nobody wants to talk about at dinner in six months.

I’m not bitter. I’m just tired of watching smart people pretend they didn’t see it coming.

-Whenever You Are Ready-

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See you soon!

-Alvaro (@theartmarketguy)

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Not financial advice. Frame&Flame is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions.