Photo Credit: Lazarides Inc.
Steve Lazarides is an art world anomaly, in the best way possible. Photographer, creator, and collector are just some of his job titles—oh, in addition to being the mysterious Banksy’s former art dealer and collaborator. Lazarides finds himself overwhelmingly fed up with the market-oriented focus of the art world, in the parallel presence of what he describes as growing “alienation to the value of artwork.”
He is striving to undercut this societal estrangement to the value of art in his creation of [Laz Emporium](https://lazemporium.com/), a new multifaceted digital e-commerce site which has just gone live. Encompassing varied works Lazarides is involved with, the site features books, art prints, and Artefacts (a collaboration with artists to repurpose vintage furniture). His intention with the site is to showcase art that can be enjoyed widely by the general public, in an accessible platform highlighting differing mediums.
In addition to this project, Lazarides has released his second book, [Banksy Captured Volume Two](https://lazemporium.com/collections/books/products/banksy-captured-volume-2), which displays new unpublished photographs and origin stories of Banksy’s work from the late 90s to early 2000s. FLAUNT had the chance to talk to Lazarides about the cumulation of Laz Emporium, his favorite past projects with Banksy, and his view on the shifting observation of art in the modern world.
**What has your creative headspace been like in quarantine?**
My creative headspace during quarantine has been quite a funny space. I have a large family, so I was on lockdown with a total of 7 of us. 5 of them were children between the ages of 6-15 years so it was a hectic time with not a lot of time to think because we were homeschooling and looking after the children. However, it was a great time for free thinkers and I got everyone involved in the creation of [Laz Emporium](http://www.lazemporium.com/). Things started to become really clear during lockdown and pushed me in doing what I’ve always wanted to do, combine all my interests and put it all together with the platform.
**What are your thoughts on those projects in LA featured in the Banksy book?**
I think Banksy’s Barely Legal projects that we did in LA in 2006 is still to date one of the finest projects I’ve ever been involved in. It was one of those projects that’s more than the sum total of its parts. At that point in time, Banksy was only already kind of known in a small crew in America so for us to get almost 60,000 people in 3 days was totally insane. The whole thing just caught fire! If we sat down and wrote a script on what that thing was, it would be thrown to every studio in LA for being too fantastical. The shared breadth of the visitors was absolutely mindblowing. It was just one of the most finest looking shows I’ve had the pleasure to take part in. Everything just came together to make it such a stunning show. Regardless of what he has done since, this is probably the best show he’s ever done in my opinion and it’s the show that launched him into a global scale.
**What is your favorite memory from working with Banksy?**
I think my favorite Banksy memory is probably the set up of Pictures on Walls and the fact that we as a company aimed in making cheaper art for the masses, changing people’s perspective on who was allowed to buy art and who wasn’t. Suddenly for the first time in history it was ok for ordinary people to buy art and I’m grateful to have taken a part of that.
**How did you decide what pieces to include in Laz Emporium and what artists to collaborate with?**
It was just an extension of what I’ve been doing in the past 30 years. None of it really makes sense, it’s just a collection of my taste and my curation that I feel kind of fits together. Whether that be a piece of African photography or a 3D print, in my mind they all just sit well on the website together. I’ve lived my whole life in subculture and I’m looking to bring something that has some sense of defiance and that’s saying something. It includes a very wide breadth of things, and basically if I like it, it goes in.
**Do you see the intersection of political dialogue with art growing, especially in current tumultuous societal times?**
You can see from my choice of imagery that political dialogue and art is something that’s close to my heart. I don’t think there has been a big increase of it as a result of the pandemic as I feel like people are producing something more happier during these times instead of producing something with a political edge, but I do wish that changes.
**Explain the importance of graffiti or street art to you?**
My love for graffiti stretches back to a very long time from when I was in my teens and it stuck with me ever since. I love the fact that there was this movement that belonged to us and it wasn’t owned by the upper class in the world, it was just a street movement that was owned by the people. I love that the art that was being put up was political by nature. It’s deeply imbued in my DNA and I take great delight on how powerful the movement has become so yeah the importance of graffiti in my life is absolutely massive.
**How do you see the role of art changing in modern society?**
It seems that in the past decade or so, the general public have kind of fallen out of love with art and I think a lot of that has come to the alienation to the values of artworks. It's hard for the general population to comprehend paintings costing millions of pounds. But when you step back 15-20 years ago, the art world was in the public eye all the time, people like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, Banksy, Shepard - all these people that are constantly in the press and constantly being championed by the general public and I think that slowly that has changed. I don’t have a theory on necessarily why this happened but it has. However with things like Instagram, I feel like art is slowly coming back to the general public, just in a different way. If you look at the people who follow artists on Instagram, you can see that there’s still that interest in viewing art. I think it’s being viewed in a slightly different way, it’s not being looked at in galleries/museums, but it’s being accessed through phones/tablets. I think there’s more opportunity now for artists to directly interact with their fans rather than from a third party like the olden days.
**What do you think fundamentally needs to change about the art world?**
It needs to get a sense of humor, it needs to have people working in the industry that actually care about art and the artist, rather than just the financing. It needs to be more engaging, it needs to become more public facing so that the public can access it more. I think a lot more galleries need to go, to be honest, and I think that has been happening during COVID-19 times. I think art needs to sort of be reclaimed by the general public rather than by collectors.
**Any other upcoming future projects?**
One I’m working on actively at the moment is a book that’s made by the Inner Youth in the UK, aged under 21. What I’m asking them to do is go and document their environment and submit the photos so I can edit a documentary book of the state of Britain’s society as seen through the eyes of the youth and those who are underprivileged. I’m also working on making a physical space for Laz Emporium, bucking the trend and trying to open a space in the high street. And then, I’m also experimenting with the manufacturing equipment we’ve got for Laz Emporium to see what’s possible and what’s feasible and how far we can push the technology to create interesting artwork. And I’m having a baby in December, that’s the other project.
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