A bouquet for Banksy

It's not a graffiti sale!" Julian Roupe of Bonhams, the London auction house, mock-chided me. "We are calling it an Urban Art sale." Well, that's what Bonhams may be calling it, but most people are calling next week's auction the Banksy sale.

The catalogue for the February 5 evening sale has a Banksy on the cover, and 20 pieces inside, one of which is estimated to fetch between £150,000 and £200,000. Earlier this month a Banksy was offered on eBay for £1m. Last October, the Hollywood power couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt paid £1m for Banksy works at a sale in Soho organised by his London gallerist, Steve Lazarides.

It is clear that Banksy, the alter-ego of a 33-year-old Bristol artist, Robert Banks, has joined Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin as a popular 'art star'. But will the work - or the phenomenon - have Hirst and Emin's staying power?

Banksy's work has won considerable acceptance among buyers but the art world has preferred to focus upon his strategies at getting it into the public eye. Aside from his public stencils he has infiltrated pieces into museums, fabricated £10 Banksy of England notes bearing the likeness of Diana, painted on animals and much else.

Many see him as a perfect fit with today's art world, being a master manipulator of his own marketplace, and there are pieces at Bonhams - Rude Copper, lot 65, is one of 250 numbered screenprints and it has a 'printed signature' - that will reinforce this view.

But this is a reflex cynicism, the result of over-exposure to the provocations of the 1980s and the Young British Artists or YBAs. And it is quite wrong.

Banksy is an activist who combines humour and anarchy. A recent article by Peter Kennard in the New Statesman makes it plain that Banksy’s Christmas trip to Bethlehem - in which he joined local artists to paint murals on the West Bank barrier - was no stunt.

He is part of a conga line that has included the Situationists (whose graffiti slogans such as 'Beneath the paving stones - the beach!' and 'Live Without Dead Time' powered the Paris revolt of 1968), the Icelandic artist Erro, Zap Comix, and Jamie Reid who did the cover of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen.

Will the work last? After all, little is heard or seen of the once feted graffiti artists of the 80s nowadays, with the exception of Keith Haring, stylistically a different animal, who is in Bonhams as a father figure. But there are reasons for that.

Their explosions of colour, form, raw energy looked magnificent in loaded contexts, as on grimy urban walls, but transferred to unthreatening canvas on gallery walls, they leaked energy.

The work at Bonhams - and not just Banksy's, but pieces by Faile, Andrew McAttee and D*Face - come from a different place. Their antecedents tend to be graphics, advertising, comic books, so they are self-contained, and transfer well to gallery walls or the walls of the bien pensant bourgeoisie who are among their targets.

Indeed a striking thing about the London show last summer in which Banksy was paired with Andy Warhol, was how good one of the Banksies which had been most crudely ripped from its setting looked. Banksy is more than a passing fad, you can count on it. ·