Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  On the other hand there are private dealers, gallery owners, and now museums and many artists themselves, who say that while street art belongs on the streets, the studio art that has developed from it is different and can be bought and sold – as a canvas or a print – like any other artist’s work. For, as Larry Gagosian says, ‘Art dealers feel they have to obfuscate the mercantile part of their profession but let’s not kid ourselves – it’s a business. Artists have families and children and like anyone else they want to live decently – sometimes very decently.’

  Their argument goes that this trading of art in the traditional way will not damage the integrity of the art still out there on the streets. When Banksy produced his Kate Moss prints or his detourned oil paintings they were never intended to be on the streets, they have not been taken out of context. It is the collectors who try to profit from the door, the water tank, the wall who are taking his art out of context.

  So far he has managed to straddle the two worlds, although his subversiveness diminishes as his prices rise. But he comes from a very identifiable subculture, and he appears to have reached the awkward point where he wants to remain somehow part of that subculture while his very success makes it almost impossible for him to do so.

  Take the riots in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol in the spring of 2011, which started after police raided a squat occupied by opponents of a newly opened Tesco Metro store close by. The police said the raid followed information that petrol bombs were being made at the squat. Banksy’s response was to produce a £5 ‘commemorative souvenir poster’ of a ‘Tesco Value Petrol Bomb’ (marked ‘Highly Flammable’) with its fuse alight. The proceeds, he said on his website, were to go to the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft and its associates, an organisation which for several years and in various imaginative ways has been attempting to revive the neighbourhood. Despite some rain, the inevitable queue formed at the Anarchist Bookfair where the poster was being sold one Saturday, but Banksy’s generosity was not universally welcomed. Although there had been criticism of the police, there were also suggestions that the anti-Tesco protest had been hijacked by outsiders and some felt Banksy was merely polishing his right-on credentials, ‘supporting a load of outsiders who are destroying a local community’. Many on the web supported Banksy, some pleading for anyone in the queue to buy them a poster too; nevertheless, being denounced as a ‘Champagne Socialist’, as he was on one website, might have hurt a little. (The poster was soon on sale on eBay for more than £100.)

  Other street artists, particularly in America, move easily between the world of the street and the commercial world without any of the qualms that Banksy has. Shepard Fairey has established an impressive business empire with three strands: OBEY Clothing, ‘a brand that speaks to many different genres’, his gallery Subliminal Projects, and his creative brand agency Studio Number One, whose clients include Nike, Red Bull and the Honda Civic – and that’s quite apart from his work as an artist on the streets. No one comes near matching Fairey’s commercial success, but other offerings from street artists include a Faile shower curtain, a $278 limited edition vibrator with a Jamie Hewlett etching on it, a lightbulb designed by New York street artist Kaws and a Pure Evil hair straightener. Indeed Pure Evil, whom I met very early on in my research, seemed rather less of an outlaw a year later when his flat was featured in the style pages of The Times magazine with a headline that read ‘Residence Evil, the graffiti artist’s home’.

  Banksy is never going to let his home be photographed, but he is always having to draw fine lines in a world which has become increasingly attractive to brand managers. The work of some contemporary artists has become, as one critic put it, ‘accessible honey pots to sponsors’, and if Georgio Armani can sponsor an exhibition by Richard Hambleton, ‘the godfather of street art’, in New York, Milan and London, what price would the right brand pay to sponsor Banksy?

  At the MOCA exhibition in Los Angeles Banksy managed to stay one step away from sponsorship – just. Two of the world’s omnipresent brands, Nike and Levi’s, were among the exhibition’s key sponsors. Nike built a skate ramp for the exhibition and brought in the Nike team of skateboarders. If indeed you exited through the gift shop, you could buy Space Invader key chains for $8 each or, rather more to the point, for $250 a limited edition Levi’s ‘trucker jacket’ with a selection of different street artists’ work on the back. Banksy was not one of those artists, but Shepard Fairey’s gallery ‘curated’ this project and one of the jackets was designed by Fairey. The museum’s director, Jeffrey Deitch, admitted that there had been difficulty presenting the idea of sponsorship to many of the artists. ‘We had dialogues to explain what we were doing with the artists, and made the sponsors also understand that they are not sponsoring the artists – they’re simply helping the museum to make this happen,’ he explained. So that was OK then.

  But each step poses problems. Banksy dislikes people being charged to go to see exhibitions – his are always free – but here he was in Los Angeles, where the entry fee was $10 a head. Halfway through the exhibition he announced he was sponsoring free Mondays at MOCA, thus joining Wells Fargo Bank which was sponsoring free Thursday evenings. ‘I don’t think you should have to pay to look at graffiti. You should only pay if you want to get rid of it,’ he said, but despite his sponsorship people would of course have to pay for most of the week. (With the help of his free Mondays the exhibition had a record 201,000 visitors during its run, just beating the previous record set by an Andy Warhol retrospective.)

  He does not accept sponsors, but he was exhibiting in a gallery that needed sponsors to help make the exhibition happen. He decried galleries as ‘trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires’, yet here he was in Los Angeles exhibiting in a museum which had only been saved from extinction by a $30 million ‘challenge’ grant not from a mere millionaire but from a billionaire, the philanthropist Eli Broad.

  A few years back he was infiltrating galleries; now he is not only exhibiting at MOCA but also loaning his work to other galleries. In December 2011 he gave the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool a work called ‘Cardinal Sin’ a replica of an 18th-century bust of a priest with his face sawn off and pixelated by small bathroom tiles. In case anyone failed to understand what it was about Banksy pronounced: ‘at this time of year it’s easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity – the lies, the corruption, the abuse.’ His carefree days as the subversive vandal are surely over and he is entering a new, more complicated phase in his career.

  When I first started research on this book I thought of Banksy as a sort of happy-go-lucky vandal: entertaining, a bit of a mystery and generally a force for good, popping up on walls all over the place and gone before anyone could find him. I think of him now as a much more permanent fixture; very talented and very clever, at the pinnacle of the burgeoning street art movement even though he paints some pictures that go from studio to collector without ever going near the street. He is much richer than I ever imagined and much, much more controlling. I was asked once if Banksy would like this book; the answer I am sure is no, for whatever it says about him the fact is this is a book he does not control.

  His achievement is extraordinary. It is his own unique talent, nourished in the key years by the showmanship of Steve Lazarides, that has enabled him to bypass the London cognoscenti and get to where he is today. His art has attracted a whole new audience to a world badly in need of new fans. But perhaps he now has to accept that while he is a very good artist and a very good film-maker, he is no longer part of the subculture he sprang from. He is not a revolutionary and never will be, although images like the girl floating with her balloons over the Israeli wall, the OAPs using bombs as bowls, the CCTV cameras watching over the idyllic countryside, need no thesis alongside them and speak directly and succinctly to the viewer. There are times when his pronouncements sound pompous and irritating – clichés wrapped up as deep thoughts. But the images are different – they make us admire him, make us laugh and mak
e us think, not so much about what the painting means but about the subjects he has taken on. As for his film, while people argue about Exit Through the Gift Shop they tend to forget that it is a wonderful commentary on the way that art can be produced and marketed in the twenty-first century.

  And that should be enough. Perhaps the time has come when he will have to change his own rules. He can remain sort of anonymous for as long as he likes, but he cannot remain the subversive street rebel for ever, juggling £5 Molotov cocktail posters with £50,000 pieces in the auction rooms. The more Banksy and his team – which is tighter than ever – try to control his image, to authorise his unauthorised life, to pretend he is the same rebel he was a decade ago, the more difficult it becomes and the more they cloud his enormous achievements. Eventually his joke I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit might begin to wear thin.

  Sources

  There are two Banksy websites. www.banksy.co.uk is the one where you will find the biggest selection of his art. When the cry goes up ‘there’s a new Banksy’ then, if it is genuine, it will usually appear on this site a couple of days later although, confusingly, this does not give it authentication. Occasionally a picture of a new piece will appear here before anyone has spotted it.

  If you want to buy a Banksy print (good luck) or prints from a list of almost sixty artists who they also sell, then go to www.picturesonwalls.com, Banksy’s online gallery. You can also visit the gallery at 46–48 Commercial Street, London E1 6LT.

  Three sites that I used follow Banksy in fine detail, providing a huge amount of useful information if you have time to go through all the posts. The site I probably made most use of is www.UrbanArtAssociation.org. This is the original Banksy Forum site set up in 2006. I also used www.thebanksyforum.com, as well as the Banksy group on flickr: www.flickr.com/groups/banksy. The site www.banksy-prints.com gave a very helpful list of Banksy prints and the prices they were issued at, but this record unfortunately seems to have come to a halt in the middle of 2010. However the site’s founder says it will be fully operational again in 2012.

  The one blog I get sent and read every day is Vandalog, which you can find at http://blog.vandalog.com. Founded in 2008 by R.J. Rushmore, who divides his time between London and Philadelphia where he is at university, it is a very good record of what is happening in the street art world and where; there are many things I would have missed but for Vandalog pointing them out. I even bought a couple of T-shirts off this site at Christmas.

  On the East Coast the key site is www.woostercollective.com. The founders of the site, Marc and Sara Schiller, have close links to Banksy – his New York museum incursions, for instance, were first announced on this site. Wooster carries street art pictures from around the world but is less newsy than Vandalog. Another New York-based site, http://thestreetspot.com/, concentrates more exclusively on the city. On the West Coast probably the site I used the most was http://melroseandfairfax.blogspot.com – again very useful, although I certainly was not on it every day.

  Other sites that I have used regularly include:

  http://arrestedmotion.com/

  http://www.neublack.com/

  http://nuart09.blogspot.com

  http://boingboing.net/

  http://www.ukstreetart.co.uk/

  http://streetartlondon.co.uk/

  http://unurth.com/

  Good pictures of all of his exhibitions, photographed exten sively by fans, can be found via Google. One of the best sites for Banksy photographs is http://www.flickr.com/photos/romanywg/. Other flickr sites that Vandalog rates include:

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/nolionsinengland/ (London),

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunapark/ (New York) and

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/lord-jim/ (Los Angeles).

  Banksy interviews

  These are the interviews with Banksy that I used or consulted; it was only while compiling this list that I realised quite how often Banksy goes public, like any other artist, when he thinks he needs to. Some articles are full interviews with him (almost all by email), others include within them some emailed quotes from him. Most are easily found on the web and I will only give exact web references where they take a bit of hunting down. There may be one or two instances where a fake Banksy has crept in but I am sure that the great majority of these interviews are genuine.

  ‘Banksy (Yes Banksy) on Thierry, EXIT Skepticism & Documentary Filmmaking as Punk, All These Wonderful Things’. A.J. Schnack, http://edendale.typepad.com, 21 December 2010

  ‘Exclusive: Banksy in his own words’.

  Nick Francis, Sun, 4 September 2010. (This is an accurate transcript of the Banksy interview included as one of the extras in Exit Through the Gift Shop, so it is not exactly exclusive, but it is useful.)

  Banksy’s first Australian interview. Kylie Northover, The Age, 29 May 2010

  ‘Banksy Talks Art, Power and Exit Through the Gift Shop’. Nancy Miller, Wired magazine, April 2010

  ‘Street (il)legal: Q&A with Banksy’. David Fear, Time Out, New York, 12 April 2010

  ‘Banksy Revealed?’ Shelley Leopold, LA Weekly, 8 April 2010

  ‘World Exclusive: Banksy’. Ossian Ward, Time Out, 4 March 2010

  ‘Banksy Woz ’Ere’. Eleanor Mills, Sunday Times Magazine, 28 February 2010

  ‘Banksy goes home to shake-up Bristol’. Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times, 14 June 2009

  ‘Breaking the Banksy’. Lee Coan, Mail on Sunday Live magazine, June 2008

  ‘Banksy was Here. The invisible man of graffiti art’. Lauren Collins, The New Yorker, 14 May 2007

  ‘Banksy: The Naked Truth’. Interview with Shepard Fairey, Swindle magazine, no. 8, Autumn 2006

  ‘Banksy hits the big time’. Luke Leitch, The Times, September 2006

  ‘Beware it’s Banksy’. Roger Gastman, LA Weekly, September 2006

  ‘Give me Monet, that’s what I want’. Morgan Falconer, The Times, 11 October 2005

  ‘Art Attack’. Jeff Howe, Wired magazine, August 2005

  ‘Need talent to exhibit in museums? Not this prankster’. Randy Kennedy, New York Times, March 2005

  ‘British prankster smuggles art into top NY museums’. Reuters, March 2005

  ‘Something to spray’. Simon Hattenstone, Guardian, 17 July 2003

  ‘Banksy, graffiti artist’, Emma Warren, Observer, 26 May 2002

  The collection of interviews below can be found through the Urban Art Association, the Banksy Forum or the banksy flickr group and some are on all three sites.

  ‘Banksy’. Design is Kinky magazine, November 2002

  ‘Creative Vandalism’. Jim Carey, Squall magazine, 30 May 2002

  ‘Banksy and Shok1 chatting’. Big Daddy Magazine, issue 7, 2001

  There is also a ‘transcript of an interview with Banksy by Squall back in 2001’. This may well be from the short film Banksy, Boom or Bust, Squall Productions for Channel 4, August 2001.

  ‘Painting and Decorating’. Si Mitchell, Level magazine, June/July 2000

  ‘The Enemy Within’. Boyd Hill, Hip-Hop Connection, no. 136, April 2000

  Radio and television

  Santa’s Ghetto in Bethlehem. Paul Wood, BBC Radio 4 PM, Christmas 2007

  Interview at the time of the publication of Wall and Piece. Zina Saro-Wiwa, The Culture Show, November 2005

  Interview at the time of his incursions into New York’s museums. Michele Norris, National Public Radio, March 2005

  Interview before his Severnshed exhibition. Fergus Colville, BBC Radio Bristol, February 2000

  Steve Lazarides

  ‘Urban Renewal’. Andrew Child, Financial Times, 28 January 2011

  ‘Steve Lazarides: Tunnel visions’. Alice Jones, Independent, 12 October 2010

  ‘Banksy’s Ex-Gallerist talks about their breakup, Depictions of Hell’. Susan Michals, Vanity Fair Daily, 11 October 2010

  ‘On the run with London’s bad-boy gallerist’. Michael Slenske, www.artinfo.com, 1 October 2010

  ‘Steve L
azarides: Graffiti’s Uber-dealer’. Luke Leitch, The Times, 11 July 2009

  ‘Keeping it real’. Alice O’Keefe, New Statesman, October 2008

  ‘The Banksy Manager’. Charlotte Eager, ES magazine, November 2007

  ‘A shop window for outsiders’. Alastair Sooke, Daily Telegraph, August 2007

  Exit Through the Gift Shop

  ‘Ron English Revelations’. Jim Vorel, http://www.heraldre-view.com/blogs/decaturade/article_2217fed0-cf18-11e0-9659-001cc4c002e0.html, 25 August 2011

  ‘Getting at the truth of Exit Through the Gift Shop’. Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times, 22 February 2011. This was the lengthiest and most detailed interview with Mr Brainwash that I read.

  There was a 40-minute interview with the film’s producer, Jamie D’Cruz, and editor, Chris King, which I found on www.viddler.com but which is now not easily accessible.

  ‘Hyping the “Gift Shop”’. Eric Kohn, www.indiewire.com, 15 November 2010

  ‘Banksy docu marketers let auds help out’. Caroline Ryder, www.variety.com, 19 June 2010

  ‘Thierry Guetta is real’. Alex Jablonski, http://sparrowsongs.wordpress.com, 22 April 2010

  Shepard Fairey interviewed by WNYC radio about Mr Brainwash and Banksy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiVxOzMFX gw&feature=related, uploaded 21 April 2010

  ‘Banksy movie boasts strong opening numbers in non-traditional release’. Peter Knegt, www.indiewire.com, 19 April 2010. Also on the same website by the same writer: ‘Exit strategy: Bringing Banksy to the Masses’, 7 April 2010