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