Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  Banksy’s venture on to a Yorkshire farm in search of a location for his illustration for Blur’s Observer Music Monthly magazine cover shows just what a difference Pest Control has made. In 2007 the farmer’s daughter sent to market part of the sheet metal gate on which Banksy had stencilled a girl happily hugging her TV set, done as a sort of trial run for the main picture, where a different TV set is being thrown out of the window. When the shed was being renovated she managed to salvage half of the gate just before it was chucked into a skip. She kept it under her bed for a year or so until a friend who worked at an auctioneer’s suggested that there was money in her old gate.

  In April 2007 the gate went into the same Bonhams auction as Space Girl and Bird, with an estimate of between £10,000 and £15,000. It was accompanied by a statement of fact about Banksy’s farm visit for the Observer shoot and photographs of the gate still in situ, with the TV girl on it, but no other authentication. It sold for £38,400.

  In July 2008 the farmer himself thought he would give it a try. He loaded on to a trailer not a gate, but the whole wall from his barn. This bore the stencil that had featured on the front of the Observer Music Monthly, so there was no doubt at all that it was by Banksy and the estimate, £30,000 to £50,000, reflected this. But now Pest Control existed and the farmer did not have his certificate – it seems very unlikely that he knew he needed one. Andrew Stewart, the dealer now trying to sell the wall, believes the van broke down or the trailer got a puncture on the way to London, but either way it was a long, wasted trip: the wall did not sell.

  Since then, says Mr Stewart, ‘We’ve had great fun trying to sell it. At one stage we were thinking of having a black tie do to introduce people to it on the farm.’ The asking price has come down to between £20,000 and £25,000 – cheap for a Banksy wall – but there have still been no takers. ‘We know it is 100 per cent right but people are quite strange about authentication letters,’ says Stewart. It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for the farmer. He did Banksy and the Observer a big favour at very short notice, his wall is completely authentic, and if he had put it on the market six months earlier it would have sold. Banksy cannot claim he would be opening himself up to a possible prosecution if he admitted that he did the painting, since the farmer selling the wall was the man who gave him permission to spray it in the first place.

  A couple of other ‘salvaged’ pieces also failed to sell at the same auction, one on a ceramic tile and the other on a piece of plywood; neither had the right authentication. But this was just a skirmish. The deciding battle came a little later, at the end of September 2008. The Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull had made a very successful foray into the London art market earlier in the year with a sale of British art from the 1960s held at the Royal Academy. Now they hoped to build on that with a second auction, this time in a deconsecrated church opposite Regent’s Park. The auction was controversial enough anyway, selling off pieces from the recently closed Colony Room – the louche Soho drinking club made famous by the likes of Francis Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard – that over the years artist members had given in lieu of their bar bills. But, just as controversially, among the twenty-four Banksys for sale were five street pieces which had been authenticated, not by Pest Control but by a new organisation called Vermin. Four of the five pieces were rats. There was a photographer rat, painted on a traffic bollard and submitted to the sale by Jon Swinstead, one of the original backers of Pictures on Walls. There was a gangsta rat from Liverpool on plywood and a drill rat on MDF from Brighton. There was a refuse rat painted on a metal door that had been one of the pieces I had tried to find on my original Banksy tour – now I knew why I could not find it. The estimates for these rats were in the £20,000 to £40,000 range. Finally there was a piece called Fungle Junk, a huge work in three parts which had originally been painted on the side of an articulated lorry. The estimate for this was between £100,000 and £150,000.

  All these pieces had been authenticated by Vermin, but would that count? Vermin was set up by four dealers. Inevitably Robin Barton of Bankrobber was key amongst them. James Allen, who more usually dealt in antiquarian books, was a second, and there were two others. They were, their anonymous spokesman said, an entirely independent body and what they could offer would be their professional opinion based on their collective knowledge of Banksy’s early works.

  While Banksy and many of his most committed fans thought that his works should be left to live or die on the streets, Vermin argued that they should be preserved and marketed like any other important piece of art – recognised ‘for the iconic foundation stones they are’. For that to happen buyers needed to feel confident in what they were buying – one piece had been rejected from the sale because Vermin were not convinced of its authenticity.

  They stressed that they were ‘in no way connected to the artist’, which was certainly true. So the work would be classified as authentic without Banksy ever having to own up to it. It all sounded mildly tongue in cheek, as though they were doing Banksy a favour. Unsurprisingly he did not see it that way, and nor did his fans.

  ‘He is a cult for a lot of people,’ says Barton. ‘When I did that sale the forums went absolutely berserk. The vitriol was unbelievable. It was almost as if I had murdered someone. And it was all because I was going against their artist’s wishes. These are forum people. They have got a computer at home and they have bought a couple of prints and therefore suddenly they are part of this bigger church. I quite like it in some ways, but it’s also a bit insane really.’

  Banksy’s reaction was a good deal more subtle than that of his enraged fans. The day before the sale took place he issued a statement which killed both Vermin and any hope of selling any of the five pieces authenticated by Vermin. ‘Graffiti art has a hard enough life as it is – with council workers wanting to remove it and kids wanting to draw moustaches on it, before you add hedge fund managers wanting to chop it out and hang it over the fireplace. For the sake of keeping all street art where it belongs I’d encourage people not to buy anything by anybody unless it was created for sale in the first place.’

  If that was not clear enough, Pest Control announced on its website: ‘All works authenticated by Pest Control have been done so in conjunction with the artist. Banksy does not provide this service through any other third parties and we would caution collectors against relying on such bodies.’ Since its creation eight months earlier Pest Control had ‘identified 89 street pieces and 137 screen prints falsely attributed to the artist . . . [he] would encourage anyone wanting to purchase one of his images to do so with extreme caution, but does point out that many copies are superior in quality to the originals.’

  ‘If you read that story over someone’s shoulder on the tube you’d think that Lyon & Turnbull were selling fakes, but when you read the small print it said nothing of the sort,’ says Barton. ‘There were never any fake Banksys being sold. They were just Banksys that Banksy no longer had control over. The fact that it wasn’t intended for resale by Banksy is kind of irrelevant to me. If it’s not stolen, if proof of ownership is there, then I am prepared to try and market the pieces.’

  Whatever Barton might think, the sale was a disaster. None of the four rats sold, nor did Fungle Junk. These were difficult times in the auction rooms anyway, but the malaise seemed to spread like a disease from these five disputed lots to the whole auction. Of the twenty-four works by Banksy in the sale only five managed to sell, and the overall selling rate for all the lots was under 30 per cent. Lyon & Turnbull’s London ambitions were badly damaged and Vermin was destroyed – or, as a writer on one of the Banksy forums wrote with obvious glee, ‘Bye, bye Vermin.’ Pest Control emerged triumphant. But there was one fight Banksy failed to win.

  It was not a dealer who took on Team Banksy, but the two travellers who owned Fungle Junk. They had been friends with him from way back in his crusty days and saw no reason why he should not help them now he had risen to such heights. They were not asking for charity, just auth
entication.

  When they are not on the road Maeve Neale and Nathan Wellard, now both in their thirties, live in a field in Norfolk with their four children. Trying to find them is a bit like trying to find Dave Panit, although the road to their field is much more potholed. A decorative skull and crossbones on the gate warns you to keep out – but oddly in a rather friendly, welcoming way. When I arrived, there were children on a trampoline, dogs and horses, with lots of trailers and fairground equipment scattered about, as well as a random punch bag hanging from a tree, but there was no door and thus no door bell. A shout through the hedge, however, brought a result. Maeve came out trailing children. They had all just come back exhausted from Glastonbury where they had been supplying tents, and Nathan was already off preparing for a trip down to Cornwall for another festival the next morning.

  It was a wonderful summer’s day and this woodland hidey hole, deep in the middle of nowhere, the base for their hard travellers’ life, seemed like some fairy-tale land entirely separate from the world the rest of us inhabit. Winter, I suspect, would be very, very different. Rickety wooden steps went up to their home, an articulated trailer, or two articulated trailers married together. A lovely wooden dog carved by a chainsaw artist met me, but the trailer spoke of a tough existence. They had created one large room for everyone to live in, along with a room for the parents, a bedroom that housed all four children, a shower and a loo on the way out. The children packed away the groceries and happily made tea for us while we sat in the sunshine and Maeve told me their story and the fight they had had with Banksy.

  Their articulated trailer started life as a refrigeration unit before it became their home. They used to hitch it up and go travelling to wherever they were delivering tents. But what they saw as a home, Banksy saw as an inviting canvas; he contacted them through Seb Bambini, paid them their diesel money and in return got to paint one side of the trailer at Glastonbury in 1999. At this point, anonymity was not a major issue. ‘It was performance art,’ said Maeve. ‘He did a show over three days in front of loads of people.’ It is a huge piece covering the whole side of the lorry. There are a group of about six dodgy-looking men, vaguely military in appearance and supported by helicopters in the distance, carrying an inflatable dinghy up what is presumably a beach. The dinghy is loaded not with guns, as you would expect, but with a sound system and someone who looks like a DJ sits in the back of it on the decks. On the other half of the ‘canvas’, separated by a small window, Inkie went to work with some intricate graffiti lettering spelling STEALTH – although, what with all the cider and sunshine, the L vanished somewhere along the way.

  Banksy finished it at the Sun and Moon Festival in Cornwall a few weeks later, doing some touching up, some outlining and adding the words which give some sort of meaning to this strange scene: ‘IT’S BETTER NOT TO RELY TOO MUCH ON SILENT MAJORITIES . . . FOR SILENCE IS A FRAGILE THING . . . ONE LOUD NOISE AND ITS GONE.’ He gave the picture to the two travellers, telling them they could paint over it if they didn’t like it. They never touched it and it remains on one side of the trailer, although plywood sheets now protect it from the elements and from anyone who might fancy their very remote chances of stealing a huge Banksy.

  The next year Banksy did a piece on the other side of their home, although this time it was the other way round, they paid him: ‘Only a couple of hundred quid, I think.’ This is – or was, since it appears it no longer exists – the piece called Fungle Junk, which, in pictures at least, does not look nearly so interesting. Having started out with two monkeys playing keyboard and drums, surrounded on both sides by banks of speakers, it was quite heavily altered by Banksy over time, with the monkey on keyboards re-emerging as a piglet and a stencil of Sid Vicious appearing out of nowhere.

  For several years this stayed on the other side of the trailer and it became something of an attraction. ‘I remember waking up in Brighton,’ Nathan told me later, ‘getting up and going outside, only to find forty or so people taking photographs. You couldn’t park it in private anywhere any more.’

  Banksy stayed friends with the couple. He wasn’t exactly a traveller, but for a time he was part of the whole movement. He even had his own small caravan, covered with graffiti of course, and a van covered in zebra stripes. ‘He enjoyed a good party, a friendly bloke who would come to raves here and stay for a few days.’

  But as the family expanded, so too did their home; the side of the trailer with Fungle Junk painted on it was removed and plonked fairly casually against the children’s Wendy house so that a second trailer could be joined up, doubling the size of their living space – it must have been very cramped indeed beforehand. The very end section of Fungle Junk did not need to be taken off, so you can still stick your head inside their shower room and see that one wall has a little bit of Banksy preserved on it.

  As the price of a Banksy started escalating, people from his past – like Cookie with her graffitied-up furniture removal van and Mojo with his travelling circus, as well as Maeve and Nathan with their articulated trailer – realised that they were sitting in, or on, serious money. Maeve and Nathan contacted a local art dealer and Fungle Junk was rescued from their field, separated into three parts and bundled up into ‘museum quality’ Perspex boxes so it could take off on its last journey.

  The first stop was the Number Nine Gallery in Birmingham, where the owner claimed it as a real coup for the city to get their hands on a Banksy. It might have been a coup but there was no buyer. From there it travelled north to Hawick in Scotland, where Border Auctions, a family-run company that usually dealt in antiques, said they would have a go. Maurice Manning, a director, says, ‘We had a lot of interest and a lot of competition.’ Only two parts were put in the auction, one fetching £38,000 and the other £58,000; for a moment Fungle Junk looked tantalisingly close to being sold for almost £100,000. But the winning telephone bids both came with a condition: the pieces had to be authenticated. Manning says, ‘Pest Control wouldn’t talk to us,’ and the sale never went through. Three months later they turned up at Lyon & Turnbull authenticated by Vermin and failed again.

  At this point the pair had had enough. They were particularly incensed at how the impression seemed to have arisen that, says Maeve, ‘we had run off with artwork that wasn’t ours.’ Banksy’s right, she continues, ‘that art done for people on street walls shouldn’t be robbed and sold off, but these pieces like ours are just not in the same category . . .’

  Maeve says she is an anarchist, but there is also a distinct feeling that she is a bit of a toughie. She was not about to give up on Fungle Junk – ‘I’ve got four children and not much money.’ Eventually she got through first to Pest Control and then to Banksy. It was, in her recollection, ‘a bit of a heated conversation’ over whether her intentions were ‘capitalist’. ‘He wasn’t that unfriendly,’ she said. ‘He was just saying that he didn’t really like the fact that people were capitalising on his paintings. Which is fair comment; it’s just that he’s capitalising on them too.’

  ‘You told him that?’, I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah I don’t hold back with my words.’

  ‘And he was OK with you telling him that?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s a human being. He took it. He understood where I was coming from. Because I said I am capitalising, I totally admit it. But why not? Why shouldn’t I? It’s our painting to do what we like with. We didn’t rip it off a wall. We didn’t go and steal it from the street.’

  Eventually an unusual deal was done. Fragile Silence received Pest Control authentication, although according to Maeve it was conditional on not talking to anyone about the deal. Were any such condition to have been imposed, however, it is difficult to see how it might be effectively enforced: ‘Authenticated by Banksy, but later disowned’.

  But Fungle Junk, which Banksy was apparently never too happy with, was different. The deal was that ‘Banksy’s people’ would come and collect it –which they did, apart from that small section that still sits in t
he shower room and as far as Maeve knows it was later destroyed. This was one early Banksy that was never going to come to market. But they got more than just a certificate of authentication for Fragile Silence.

  In February 2009 there was an auction at Selfridges, ‘the first in nearly 100 years of Selfridges’ history’. Some of the work was created by artists specifically to be exhibited and then auctioned off for the Prince’s Trust; other pieces were included simply as part of the auction. Lot 69 was No Ball Games, a familiar Banksy image of two children tossing a television between them as though it was the only form of play they were allowed. What made it unique was that it was spray painted on steel. It had all the right authentication and ‘it was acquired by the present owner directly from the artist.’ The ‘present owner’ was actually Nathan and Maeve, who had been given the painting by Banksy in return for them giving him Fungle Junk. Even though it only reached £30,000, at the extreme low end of the estimate of £30,000 to £60,000, it was a result. They had got their way through a combination of dogged persistence and the fact that it was their home that Banksy had painted rather than some random wall.

  Other friends from Banksy’s past have had different experiences. Mojo’s huge truck, painted on all sides by Banksy at an outdoor millennium party in Spain, was available for viewing off Oxford Street at the end of 2011. Mojo had managed to obtain Pest Control authentication and Dreweatts were offering the whole truck for sale ‘signed with artist stamp on both sides of the chassis’ for around £400,000 (which included a year’s tax disc).

  In Los Angeles, when the four partners who owned the water tank came to sell it, they very rapidly came up against Pest Control – a body which they had never heard of before. A very disappointed Tavia D tells the story: ‘There were buyers who were willing to throw money at us but they needed that piece of paper. And I was like, what is a piece of paper? I was saying, “Do you consider this a piece of art? Then add it to your collection.”