His second successful sale was a piece known as Prick. It’s a clever work in which a museum attendant sits contentedly doing his job, knees crossed, fingers interlocked, guarding a richly framed picture. But all this security, all the bureaucracy, the guard, his pass clipped to his lapel, his uniform, his cap, his stool, the protective rope railings, are for what? To guard a picture which simply has the word PRICK spray-painted across it in blue (at some later stage someone sprayed their own tag on top).
Again it was quite easy to secure, since it was on two pieces of marine ply which were being used to board up a shop in Liverpool. Banksy had hit Liverpool at the time of the Biennial Contemporary Art Festival in 2004 and this piece lasted only about six weeks before a young couple who were visiting the Biennial saw the boarded shop and paid about £500 for the hoardings. ‘They came and sat in the gallery – it was just after all the press for the What? piece – and said “We’ve got a Banksy. Do you want to try to sell it for us?” They showed me what it was and I said “Yes, perfect, bring it in to the gallery and we will put it up and make a big fuss of it.”’ He thought the buyer of What? would take this one too. But Barton’s suggested price of £250,000 and the sellers’ valuation of £500,000 were so far apart that they took it away to try to sell elsewhere. ‘The piece went round the houses, to God knows how many galleries’ before it arrived back at Bankrobber. He eventually found a buyer for it through Stephan Keszler, a dealer colleague with a gallery in the Hamptons who had recently rented a space on Madison Avenue. ‘I said “If you want to up your profile give it a try.”’ Keszler managed to sell the piece quite quickly, but it had taken two and a half years to reach this point. Again Barton will not give the price. It is almost certainly under the £250,000 that he was suggesting, and nothing like the price the owners had originally hoped for – but not bad for an original investment of £500.
But if those are the only two wall pieces that have actually sold, what of the others that are on the market? Keszler and Barton teamed up for a huge gamble in the Hamptons in 2011 for a summer selling exhibition of seven Banksy walls, including a turtle originally painted on a condemned house in New Orleans, the two kissing policemen transferred from the side of the Prince Albert pub in Brighton and the IEAK wall from Croydon. They even brought two walls – Stop and Search, complete with a couple of bullet holes, and Wet Dog, shaking like a wet dog does – to the Hamptons from Bethlehem via England for some restoration. The project almost collapsed – literally – at the Palestinian checkpoint with Israel, where the walls had to be transferred from a Palestinian lorry to an Israeli one and amid much argument about how best to accomplish the task, Wet Dog fell down in a cloud of dust. The back of the wall was damaged but the shaking dog remained intact. Wet Dog was on sale in the Hamptons for $420,000 and Stop and Search had a price of $450,000.
Banksy’s unique publicity tour both for the release of his film and for his Oscar campaign has provided a treasure trove for American collectors. He had a problem with publicising the film, for as soon as it was released the distributor was pressuring him to rent billboards to help with its marketing. Given that he sees billboards as ‘corporate vandalism’, this put him in an awkward position; while at one moment he thought ‘maybe a couple won’t hurt’, in the end he shunned temptation in favour of travelling across America himself, leaving his signature wherever he went. It was far more effective publicity than billboards, because there was always the frisson of a Banksy being spotted in our city – with the added benefit that he had not succumbed to the temptation of actually renting a billboard.
The story of just two pieces from this campaign, one in Los Angeles and the other in Detroit, illustrates the surprising ethical dilemmas that Banksy’s work raised when all the poor man was trying do was first to publicise the film and then to win an Oscar.
In California a large, derelict water tank had been sitting all too visibly in the hills alongside the Pacific Coast Highway at Pacific Palisades for a number of years. But in February 2011 drivers woke up to something a little different. Someone had stencilled across it in large black letters: ‘This looks a bit like an elephant.’ It was Banksy and very literally he was right. He had seen what no one else had ever seen, there was a vague intriguing similarity: the tank was cylindrical, and although it stood on six steel legs rather than four animal ones, its spout had the hint of an elephant’s trunk to it. Within two weeks the elephant was gone or, as one blogger headlined it, ‘Banksy elephant is dead.’ On banksyelephant.com (which disappeared almost as rapidly as it first appeared) you could even watch a video of the ‘elephant’ first being strung up to a crane in the daylight and then, as night fell, having its legs cut away by men wielding oxyacetylene torches before finally being carted away on an American-sized truck.
What made the story even more complicated was that although the tank had not been used to store water for many years, it had housed a homeless man, one Tachowa Covington, whom YouTube videos show parading around with a crown on his head as though he owned the whole canyon. Had Banksy inadvertently turfed him out? (No, he had moved into a cave further up after a fire in his water tank home.) Was Banksy making some sort of state ment about homelessness? (No, it was all about the Oscars.)
When the Banksy paintings in Los Angeles were revealed on his website (they were not going to help him much in his Oscar campaign if no one knew they were by Banksy), it was the start of a treasure hunt to find them, to photograph them and possibly even to acquire them. Christian Anthony, who owns a ‘media design’ company, Mint Currency, looked at the website and knew exactly where the tank was. Together with his partner in the company, who prefers to be called Tavia D, they persuaded two friends, Jorge Fernandez and Steve Gallion, to join them. These two ran a waste-disposal company and thus had all the heavy moving equipment they could need.
Banksy hunting is usually a young person’s game: Tavia and Christian are in their twenties, their two friends in their thirties. ‘We saw it as a very special piece,’ says Tavia. When they actually went to inspect it, ‘We were even more inspired, we wanted it so bad. We were both huge Banksy fans and we wanted to be a part of the whole Banksy movement.’ They were determined to do everything legitimately: ‘Everyone else who was trying to get the Banksys was doing it guerrilla style, going in the middle of the night or whatever, and we weren’t trying to do that with a huge water tank.’
The history of the tank is complicated, but it had come to the point where although the City of Los Angeles did not own it, they were preparing to have it scrapped when Banksy suddenly arrived. The four friends bought the tank from the city: ‘We paid thousands of dollars, but not many thousands of dollars for it,’ says Tavia. They then went to work before anyone else could get to it. Showing Americans’ usual ability to get things done, they arrived at 8.30 in the morning, and within sixteen hours they had cut down their elephant and sent it on its way to a warehouse to await a buyer.
Tavia D says, ‘We thought, let’s just take it off the city’s hands. We wanted to save that piece of art, we were on a rescue mission.’ They thought the fact that a homeless man had once lived there made it more symbolic – Banksy perhaps was trying to draw attention to homelessness, the ‘elephant in the room’ – although there is nothing to suggest that Banksy had any greater clue than they did that the water tank had once been someone’s home. They wanted to be seen as the good guys, safeguarding an important work of art. In a statement issued at the time on banksyelephant.com, they said: ‘We have personally acquired ownership to preserve and protect the work of Banksy in hopes that it will end up exhibited in a respected museum where his work will live on without harm.’
There was no doubt, however, that the museum would have to pay good money for this privilege. ‘Obviously we were trying to make a profit, because we had to cover the costs we had invested to get the piece,’ Tavia admitted. Some of these profits, she said, would go towards helping the homeless. But as they waited for a buyer the storage costs mount
ed, and she was to find that selling the elephant was much more difficult than capturing it.
Across the country a very different Banksy piece, a 7ft × 8ft cinder block wall, has caused even more controversy, giving birth to an absorbing and entirely unexpected tale involving art, money and the law. This time there is much more to the piece than seven stencilled words. A rather forlorn boy of the kind that Banksy seems to specialise in, although this time – given that its location is inner-city Detroit – he is black, stands with his paint pot and brush (no spray paint here) beside the words he has just written on the wall: ‘I remember when all this was trees.’
What made this work so poignant was that it was surrounded by total urban desolation. For it sits – or rather sat – amidst the 35-acre site of the former Packard motor factory. The luxury carmaker once employed 40,000 people here, but the factory closed in 1956 and has remained abandoned ever since, a relic of Detroit’s days as the automobile city that ruled the world. (The devastation is abundant enough to attract artists and photographers whose bleak images are attacked as ‘ruins porn’ by some in Detroit.)
In May 2010 Carl Goines, executive director and one of the cofounders of the 555 Gallery in Detroit, was tipped off by a photog rapher that Banksy had hit the city. The photographer, a fan, had been to Exit Through the Gift Shop on the Friday night when it opened in a cinema just north of Detroit; he had seen an image on the Banksy website the next day, recognised the location and went out and found the boy that night – a very short treasure hunt. Carl rounded up his father and two other artists connected with the 555 Gallery and went to inspect the site. They tried and failed to contact the people who they thought might own the site – in some parts of Detroit land and the taxes that go with it can be a burden rather than a goldmine – but crucially they did find a foreman on site, who gave them the go-ahead as long as they did not take any scrap metal. Armed with a masonry saw, an oxyacetylene torch, a mini tractor, some plywood boards and a truck, they set to work. By the end of Monday they had cut it out, and they crated it up and off the site on Tuesday.
Goines, who is a sculptor, says he had no interest in Banksy before all this – in fact ‘I was unaware of Banksy’s work and his notoriety. So it’s been an education for me.’ For what followed was a wonderful narrative – should the 21st-century echo of the Elgin Marbles be preserved or left to die a natural death? – which took Banksy’s work to a sphere he could never have dreamed of.
Goines says they realised very early on that ‘selling it was an option that we couldn’t do lightly.’ The gallery might possibly sell the piece in years to come, but for now the only reward they would get for their efforts would be the publicity. However, the smell of money to be made always pervades anything to do with Banksy and sure enough, the owners of the site emerged from the deepest undergrowth. They wanted their wall back and they went to court for it, claiming it could be worth $100,000. They argued that the foreman who had given permission for the wall to be taken away was not their representative. ‘The acts of the defendants constitute an illegal conspiracy to take wrongful possession and control of the mural and constitute a wrongful conversion of the same’; note that at the stage when Banksy’s work entered the law courts, it had been elevated from a piece of graffiti to ‘a mural’.
It was time for the City of Detroit to wade in. The city had had trouble establishing who exactly owned the site but now, a city official said, that it was ‘clear and publicly acknowledged who the responsible party is, we will pursue all applicable areas of enforcement to hold the property owner accountable for this unsightly and dangerous situation.’ It could cost up to $20 million to demolish what was left of the factory and clear the site, and now that Banksy had inadvertently established its ownership the city was threatening to do the clear-up work and send the bill to the site owner. The city was also demanding taxes on the site stretching back over five years, and this dispute still remains unresolved. So, quite apart from anything else, Banksy had brought the issue of this huge stretch of wasteland on Detroit’s East Side sharply back into focus. As one comment posted on the blog dETROITfUNK suggested: ‘The fucking Packard is a ridiculous and insane site, which has been allowed to sit in this condition for ages. Wide open. We live here, and we almost become blind to the insanity.’
But quite apart from ownership, should the gallery have liberated the painting? The gallery found itself in the midst of an argument so bitter that after having had the wall on display for just ten days, they decided they needed to hide it. Their fear was not so much that someone would steal it, rather that someone would destroy it in protest at the fact that it had been removed from its all-important original context. ‘We had some strange threats,’ says Goines, ‘also some conversations with individuals saying they were going to come and load it up and just take it from us. The threats came from all sorts of people, including those who thought we should have allowed it to stay in the plant and be destroyed, as it would have been eventually.’
The argument in essence came down to this: context is all-important. There was no chance of the painting lasting in situ. Builders were salvaging scrap metal from the site, and if you look at some of the pictures of the painting before it was moved there are beams both beside and above it awaiting their fate. But that does not matter, argued those who were horrified to see it moved. If the Banksy stayed where it was, there would be pictures on the web which would provide a permanent record of the piece in the environment in which it was created.
Given that the wall was going to come down, the gallery members saw themselves as stewards preserving the piece, in much the same way that the British Museum has done for objects taken out of context but preserved over the centuries. But did the act of saving a piece of art actually destroy it? Goines has no regrets. The idea that street art has rules at all seems strange to him: ‘Many times they are breaking the rules and yet they say there is a rule against removing a piece from where it is installed. It just seems contradictory to me, they are setting up rules to break rules.’
It might be out of its original site, he believed, but it was not out of context: ‘I think the piece has evolved into something on its own. The whole thing has become a project in itself. It’s an ongoing escapade for Banksy, it’s something that he gets the ball rolling on and then it keeps on moving and becomes something more.’ Banksy certainly would not support the gallery’s action, but in an emailed interview conducted at the time of the Oscars he said: ‘I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.’ Becky Hart, associate curator of contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, put it rather more academically, saying that the piece had acquired its own ‘patina of narrative’.
Nevertheless, to read the many posts on dETROITfUNK you would think the men from the 555 Gallery were vandals. Nearly all these posts made broadly the same point and perhaps one in particular best sums them up. @shlee wrote:
It makes me cringe that so many are applauding this. The mere fact you’ve titled this post ‘Saving Banksy’ is a farce. The point of ‘street art’ is for it to exist in its natural environment, it is by nature temporary. Disappointing when a good piece fades away? Yes. But that’s life. More meaning in that than in some art fags cutting it out and sticking it in a gallery shortly after it has appeared. The power of that piece was in its environment. Outside of that what does it say? He created this piece in the midst of demolition. The nature of the piece in that setting, is such a social commentary I just can’t fathom how someone could miss the point to such a degree that they’d remove it and boast that they were ‘SAVING!’ it.
ms admits that moving Banksy does mean people who would not visit this part of town have a chance to see it:
But one can argue it wasn’t made for those types of people in the first place. Those artsy-fartsy types are the reason street ar
t has thrived, specifically to show that art can exist outside of stuffy galleries. The entire process is always evolving, and if something were to happen to the piece, well ‘them’s the breaks kid.’ But I’d rather venture into the Packard to see a dissed Banksy, and stand where he stood than see it butchered and hacked from the wall in some gallery. Putting it there gives it all the majesty of a lion in a cage that’s far too small . . .
But context isn’t everything; many of the exhibits we see in galleries have been taken from their original surroundings to give thousands the chance they would otherwise not have to see them. This was a Banksy that would remain ‘social commentary’ wherever it was displayed. Compare this to the Berlin Wall where, in 1990, eighty-one segments with graffiti on them were sold off at an auction in Monaco for €1.5 million. These pieces can now be seen at places as varied as the parking lot of a business plaza in California, outside the Hard Rock Café in Orlando, Florida or, almost unbelievably, behind the urinals of the men’s room in a hotel in Las Vegas. Now that is vandalism for you, and that’s leaving aside the fact that it took five years in the courts for the artists who were the key painters of this section of the wall to win any share of the proceeds.
Banksy Page 22
