Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  Not everyone felt that way. Banksy told one interviewer: ‘You’d imagine that certain folk would kinda be on your side. But I was grassed up by some transsexual hooker looking to score brownie points with the NYPD.’ In another version of the same story he said, ‘You tend to think that certain people are on your side, but obviously they ain’t . . . I got badly busted on that one. I had about seven cops raid me on a rooftop.’

  But it is very difficult to imagine Banksy getting arrested now and being let out on bail while handwriting analysts decide which are genuine Banksys and which are fakes. Even prosecutors appear to put him in a different class from other graffiti artists. In June 2011 Daniel Halpin, a 26-year-old from Camden, north London, was finally brought to court on seven charges of criminal damage. Halpin was a prolific artist known as TOX, the scourge of Transport for London, who sprayed his tag wherever he could find a space, and the prosecution, in trying to explain TOX’s ubiquity, told the jury: ‘He is no Banksy. He doesn’t have the artistic skills, so he has to get his tag up as much as possible.’ Quite apart from this misunderstanding of graffiti – the tagger’s desire for maximum exposure, never mind if this means exchanging quality for quantity – it also seemed to put Banksy on an almost untouchable level, even though his art is just as illegal as Tox’s. In the summer of 2011 Tox was jailed for twenty-seven months, the judge telling him: ‘There has to be a deterrent aspect. These offences have gone on, in your own admission, since the year 2000 . . .’ That period is only a little shorter than Banksy’s career.

  It has now reached the point where Banksy might still want to see himself as a bit of a vandal, but actually he is becoming something of a tourist attraction. When he painted a wall in north London in support of Tox, it was very rapidly covered in Perspex by the wall’s owner. When he painted new work in Bristol and Croydon, both councils held back the graffiti clean-up squads and gave their citizens a chance to vote: should ‘the Banksy’ stay or go? After one early Banksy was whitewashed over by mistake, a councillor in Bristol proposed a register of outdoor artworks across the city to help protect them.

  In Bristol the Banksy effect has turned graffiti into something of a growth industry, with one council officer suggesting the city now has three main tourist attractions: an old boat, a bridge (Brunel’s SS Great Britain and his Clifton suspension bridge), and graffiti. The council now sponsors various legal graffiti events, the latest, in the summer of 2011, being an £80,000 extravaganza called See No Evil which turned the buildings in a drab street in the city centre into what the council hopes will become the biggest permanent street art gallery in Europe. The irony was that the man heading this project was Inkie, who twenty-two years earlier, during Operation Anderson, had been the key police target in the fight against graffiti, and the buildings painted included the juvenile and magistrate courts where Inkie and others who were arrested back then had made their first appearance in court.

  As part of a difficult balancing act the council has produced a nine-page policy document on how to deal with graffiti, promising that in some instances there will be consultation on whether graffiti should be removed while warning that ‘consultation is not a referendum’. In the first example of this consultation, back in 2006, 93 per cent of the people who voted wanted the work that Banksy had sprayed on the side of the Young People’s Sexual Health Clinic – a naked man hanging from a window ledge to avoid a cuckolded husband – to be saved. So it is still there, now more under threat from fellow vandals with a paintball gun than from the council.

  In Hastings Banksy painted a picture of a girl building sandcastles, making it look as though she had painstakingly pricked the word TESCO on the side of each castle. It might not have been one of his outstanding works but it was certainly a Banksy. The council’s anti-graffiti team was about to wash it clean when first the local paper and then the council stepped in. Jay Kramer, the deputy leader of the council, said, ‘I know that we have a zero tolerance policy on graffiti, and that is absolutely right. However, we have to be flexible so on this occasion I have agreed that Banksy can be an exception to our rule and can stay.’ It is ironic that ever since having made this exception, the council has been trying to protect its Banksy first with Perspex and, when that was smashed, with some sort of protective spray. Other graffiti writers, who no doubt have suffered in the past from the council’s zero tolerance rule, see no reason why Banksy should be treated any differently.

  So, since Banksy is now being both tolerated and protected by councils, it would be more of an embarrassment than anything else if he was actually arrested. It is the second strand of Banksy’s argument for anonymity which today is the more convincing one. At the time when his film Exit Through the Gift Shop was being launched in America, he told a Los Angeles journalist – anonymously: ‘Charlie Chaplin used to say “once I talk, I’m like any other comic.” I figured I’d follow his lead.’ Several years earlier he had expounded at greater length on the theme: ‘I have no interest in ever coming out. I figure there are enough self-opinionated assholes trying to get their ugly little faces in front of you as it is. You ask a lot of kids today what they want to be when they grow up and they say “I want to be famous.” You ask them for what reason and they don’t know or care. I think Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for fifteen minutes.’

  But there is more to it than this rant, interesting though it is. At the time of the launch of Exit, he also said: ‘I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.’ His good friend Shepard Fairey, whose statements sometimes make him sound a little critical, says, ‘Banksy cares very much about selling art and what people think of him and he understands thoroughly that people’s fantasy is a far better marketing tool than reality.’ In 2010 Banksy told the Sunday Times: ‘Sometimes it might seem like an elaborate public relations stunt, but the anonymity is completely vital to my work, without it I couldn’t paint.’ While this was certainly true in his early days in Bristol, it is not entirely true today when a considerable portion of his work comes straight out of his studio on to canvas, bypassing the street entirely. Anonymity, once a necessity, has become something of a marketing tool, for having stumbled into fame he has become remarkably adept in knowing how to use it.

  It is a marketing tool he came across more by chance than design. At the end of the 1990s he was painting the side of a lorry at Glastonbury – Inkie was doing the lettering – and it became something of an open-air performance show, with no attempt to disguise who he was. But by 2000, when he gave a short interview to the BBC to publicise the opening of his exhibition in the Severnshed restaurant in Bristol, he had retreated into anonymity, although he was not using any of the voice distortion devices he uses now. (His voice sounds so ordinary on this tape, with just a gentle hint of the West Country in it, that you wonder why he bothers with voice distortion unless it is to increase the drama.) What he discovered was that anonymity created its own interest. An anonymous bad artist will remain just that and no one will have any interest in who he might be; but combining Banksy’s talent with anonymity produced a remarkable effect.

  Acoris Andipa, who has put on a succession of hugely successful Banksy exhibitions in his gallery in Knightsbridge – much to the chagrin of the Banksy camp, who certainly do not want to be associated with a Knightsbridge gallery – says: ‘I think he operates on a very simple basis. He creates his work. He has no interest in being a celebrity. The fact that he has no interest has made him into a celebrity.’ Would it make a difference if he wasn’t anonymous? ‘I just don’t believe there would be much impact on his appeal and therefore his market prices.’ But my own feeling is that his anonymity creates a buzz, an interest, a talking point. It widens his appeal and certainly increases the value of his prints, and possibly of his original canvases too. If you are in the street art world you know who Swoon, Fai
le, Fairey, Vhils, Inkie, ESPO, Blu, Mode2, Invader, Paul Insect and many, many others are; but to outsiders often the only name on the menu is Banksy. Would Banksy have been so successful if we all knew who he was? Probably not. I believe his talent is such that he would have achieved his success eventually, but it would have taken him much longer to get noticed by the wider world.

  He is often likened to Andy Warhol, encouraged by his choice of subjects: where Warhol painted Marilyn Monroe, Banksy painted Kate Moss; where Warhol painted Campbell’s soup, Banksy painted Tesco’s soup. But in many ways they are complete opposites. Warhol bought his first house from the proceeds of his commercial work, mainly shoe ads but also ads for just about any other kind of ‘ladies’ accessories’. Banksy does not now accept commercial commissions. Warhol was desperate for gallery space; Banksy usually avoids it. Warhol loved celebrity and celebrities; Banksy can’t stand them. Warhol, famously, would attend every fashionable event he could find: ‘He would go to the opening of a drawer,’ a friend once said of him. Banksy won’t even attend his own opening, let alone anyone else’s.

  And yet they have both profited from the whiff of mystery that wafts around them. In his early days at least, Warhol preferred the telephone to a face-to-face encounter; Banksy now has the added armour of email, which he prefers to either the telephone or a face-to-face interview. The vaguer Warhol’s responses to interviews became, the more they increased his appeal; the photographer Duane Michals told the authors of Pop, one of the key books on Warhol, how surprised he was to see him ‘cloaked in this air of mystery that people applied to him as if he was some sort of Zen philosopher and everything he said was a koan.’ Banksy is not so vague, but he only answers the emailed questions he wants to and leaves the rest blank. Happily he is not treated as any sort of philosopher, but nevertheless his occasional pronouncements, however mundane, gain him at least as much importance – and notice – as any other British artist of his generation.

  He has effectively stumbled into a place where he can pronounce on everything from the Israeli wall – ‘the most politically unjust structure in the world today’ – to the art world – ‘it’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious and the weak’ – and be regarded as something of an anonymous authority. But retaining this anonymity has been a very calculated and determined act. He hires a public relations agency both to garner him publicity and to protect him from it and, when necessary, he hires lawyers to protect him even further.

  Colleagues were usually amazed when I told them that Banksy had a PR agent – somehow it does not quite fit the image of the anonymous vandal. But he is now so famous that a sort of public voice is essential, even if it is only to deny that a ‘Banksy work’ is by Banksy. As soon as I started on this book I wrote a letter to this PR agent, Jo Brooks, at her office in Brighton, enclosing my last book so she could see how I wrote, advising her that I was writing this book and saying that I would very much like to talk to Banksy at some stage. As the deadline approached I made a more formal request for an interview, repeated it and repeated it once more. Eventually, with the deadline even closer, I had a note back asking for a copy of the manuscript. Since this is not an authorised biography, I declined this request. I was then told, ‘We are keen to fact check.’ I replied that this would change the nature of the book: ‘The first thing to go in would be his name (which is not in at the moment) and I would then ask you to fact check if it was correct or not, etc, etc.’ Instead I repeated my request for an interview to cover the wide range of subjects raised in the book, but heard nothing back. (Towards the end of these negotiations I was asked for questions to be emailed, but since the usual pattern has been for some questions to be answered and other key ones simply ignored I declined.) Although he has given a considerable number of emailed interviews when he has wanted to publicise an exhibition or a film, Banksy otherwise says nothing. Paul Wood, tracking him down for Radio Four’s PM programme at the time Banksy was painting Israel’s West Bank wall, said, ‘I’ve had negotiations with wanted terrorists which have gone more smoothly than our attempts to speak to Banksy.’

  A trip to Bristol showed me just how determined he was to protect himself. One of the reasons I went there was to discuss with Simon Cook, deputy leader of the city council and its executive for culture, the extraordinary success of the exhibition that Banksy had staged in 2009 at the Bristol City Museum. Part of the reason for the success of the exhibition was the element of surprise: it had been planned in complete secrecy and then, as the city’s Evening Post said, ‘appeared out of nowhere’. So I asked Simon Cook, when did he first know that the exhibition was going to launch? ‘Sorry, I can’t answer that.’ It seemed an innocent enough question so I tried again, this time hoping that if I was a bit more ingratiating it might help: ‘I was told you only knew about it a couple of days before it opened and that you were very supportive?’

  ‘Well, as soon as I saw the exhibition I was very supportive. But I can’t really answer. It’s a question to do with the planning of it and I can’t. Sorry, it’s just in breach of contract.’ The contract that Banksy’s lawyers had persuaded the city to sign before he staged the exhibition had tied everyone up in such knots of secrecy that even an innocent question about the planning, asked almost a year after the show’s closure, somehow became a breach of contract. Mr Cook is an intelligent and enjoyable politician, so at least he could see the funny side of it: here was the city’s most notorious ‘vandal’ using the full majesty of the law to protect his anonymity.

  There are other instances too where the Banksy organisation appears to have moved swiftly to protect him. The copyright of the supposed photograph of Banksy shot while he was at work in Jamaica, used in the Mail on Sunday during its investigation of his identity, was bought shortly after publication by a PR company. The price was said to be £10,000, although this figure has never been substantiated. Selling the rights to use a photograph is how photographers make their money – and it remains their copyright to sell again and again. Selling the copyright, in other words the ownership of the photograph, is unusual. The photographer has always refused to talk about the arrangement he made.

  A website that did use the photograph received a letter from media lawyers who were representing the PR company and have represented Banksy in the past, demanding that it be taken off the site within twenty-four hours or they would ‘escalate’ their action. The whole thing reads like a bad detective story: any link to Banksy could always be denied, but the PR company that bought the photograph has also represented Blur, a band with whom Banksy has had close links ever since he came to London. There is no evidence that the PR company had been instructed by Banksy to buy the photograph but it is impossible to see why the company would want to buy the picture other than to protect Banksy.

  If he needs to call in a favour to prevent a chance of him being recognised he will do so, however small that chance is. In 2003 the Observer launched the first issue of its Music Monthly with a cover of Blur shot in front of a wall which had been specially painted by Banksy. One picture which the newspaper later used in reporting the whole shoot showed Banksy cutting the stencil he was going to use on the wall. The editor of the music magazine, Caspar Llewellyn Smith, says it was shot so you saw the back of his head, ‘you couldn’t tell who he really was at all. But he rang me saying, “Can you have a word and get rid of that picture off the system?” He made a real point of saying, “You have got to get rid of that picture, no one knows what I am like, I am asking you as a mate and as a favour and will you do that please.” And I think I probably said to someone, “Do you mind just sort of losing that quietly,” which I suppose I shouldn’t have done.’ The picture disappeared and the photographer, who has remained friends with Banksy, declined to talk about it.

  Banksy is helped by the fact that people appear to enjoy a celebrity mystery just as much as they enjoy learning the ‘secrets’ of a celebrity – it lends a little variety to things. These are loyal fans who are determi
ned not to know who he is. The Mail on Sunday reader who expressed anger at the way the paper had exposed Banksy’s identity – ‘You have ruined something special’ – finds an echo in the galleries where Banksy’s art is sometimes on sale. Robin Barton, whose Bankrobber Gallery specialises in trying to sell street works by Banksy, says: ‘People really don’t want to know who Banksy is. Even collectors don’t want me to tell them who he is. It’s weird but that’s what keeps it fresh for me. In the same way I don’t want people to know who he is. Everyone can find out, it should be pretty easy, but it’s more fun and much more profitable not knowing.’

  And these are just collectors or fans who have no connection at all with Banksy other than their enjoyment of what he does and, importantly, who he is or who they imagine him to be. When you get anywhere near anyone who has had any contact with Banksy, the loyalty is even more intense. When I told a writer friend much more experienced in the alternative lifestyle to be found in the West Country that I was writing this book she emailed me back: ‘Between you and me, would you secretly like to unmask him? I am sure you must be intrigued about who he really is.’

  And I confessed: ‘No, I don’t have a desire to unmask him; but I do have a desire to join Club Banksy – the “I know who he is and I have met him, but I am not going to tell you” club.’ It is the joy of being an insider matched against the outsider who is treated as something of a leper. No matter how many times I said I was not going to expose his identity, I was not after interviewing his mum and dad, I did not want to know what he ate for breakfast, it was not enough. If I approached anyone for an interview the first question I was nearly always asked was: ‘Has Banksy authorised this request?’ The irony of this question was simply never even considered.