Banksy (3 page)

The coat he used at the Tate had been replaced by an equally inconspicuous raincoat and the hat by a rather sturdier model, but the false beard looks as though it was still there and the carrier
bag with his painting inside was almost laughably noticeable. Again he had chosen a gallery, the American Identities Gallery on the fifth floor, where there were not many visitors. We see him
saunter into the gallery with a nerveless deliberation, put his bag down against one wall, extract the painting, turn and press it up against the opposite wall, pushing down on it with a manic
intensity – determined that it was going to last longer than the three hours
Crimewatch UK
had survived at the Tate. Then he is off. The whole operation takes
exactly thirty-three seconds. According to Banksy’s book, the painting stayed there for eight days before being discovered. Reports at the time say it was three days. But even if it was only
three days, it is still a slightly depressing comment on how much interest we take in some of the paintings on display as we trail around galleries. Explaining how he got away with it, Banksy said
that the galleries ‘do get pretty full but not if you put the pictures in the boring bits’.

In Brooklyn he had chosen a boring bit, but in Manhattan itself he risked the crowds and still got away with it. How? He explained that the accomplices who were filming him also provided
distractions where necessary: ‘They staged a gay tiff, shouting very loudly and obnoxiously.’ But, more thoughtfully, he told another interviewer: ‘I think it is a testament to
the frame of mind most people are in when they are in a museum really. Most people let the world go past them and don’t pay a lot of attention to most things. Not even apparently to people
with big beards wielding around pieces of art and glueing them up.’

(All this talk of interviews makes it sound as though he was chatting to all and sundry, but of course he wasn’t. He chose the people he would talk to as carefully as he chose the
galleries: the
New York Times
, National Public Radio – the nearest thing America has to Radio Four – and Reuters. The interviews were conducted by phone or email and since no one
got to meet him they had to take on trust the fact that they were talking to or reading an email from the real Banksy.)

He claimed that he had set a target of hanging his piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for at least forty-seven days. Why
such a specific number? Because it was the
time a work by Matisse,
Le Bateau
, hung upside down before it was spotted by a visitor who informed a guard of the mistake. (He had actually got his museums muddled – an easy thing to
do. The mistake was made in the Museum of Modern Art, not the Met.) But Banksy’s piece only lasted two hours and it is easy enough to see why. In the Great American Painting wing his modified
portrait of a very proper society lady stared out at you; the gold frame fitted in well enough with the paintings around her, but she was wearing an antique gas mask. She was impossible not to
spot. A spokeswoman for the gallery said that no damage had been done to the wall or to other artworks. She added, a little sniffily, ‘I think it’s fair to say that it would take more
than a piece of Scotch tape to get a work of art into the Met.’

At the Museum of Natural History he hung an intriguing glass-encased beetle to which he had attached Airfix fighter plane wings with missiles slung beneath them. The caption declared it was a
‘
Withus Oragainstus
’ beetle (you may have to read the caption for a second time to get the joke). On the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), home of Andy
Warhol’s
32 Campbell’s Soup Cans
, he placed his own painting
Discount Soup Can
– depicting a tin of Tesco Value cream of tomato soup. He says in
Wall and
Piece
that having placed the picture on the wall he took five minutes to see what happened next. ‘A sea of people walked up, stared and left looking confused and slightly cheated. I felt
like a true modern artist.’

Most of these successful incursions came with slightly irritating faux-naïf thoughts from Banksy. After his success in New York he emailed the
New York Times
to say he had thought
about trying the Guggenheim as well but he was too intimidated: ‘I would have
had to appear between two Picassos and I’m not good enough to get away with
that.’ He said he preferred to be known as a ‘quality vandal’ rather than an artist and he went on: ‘I’ve wandered around a lot of art galleries thinking “I
could have done that”, so it seemed only right that I should try. These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they
see.’

Having finished with New York, Banksy was back in London. In May he hit Gallery 49 of the British Museum, a busy gallery full of artefacts from Roman Britain. Below a statue of Atys (youthful
lover of the mother goddess Cybele, in case you were wondering) and partially hidden by a first-century tombstone, he managed to stick up a convincingly rough piece of rock. Drawn across it, in the
style of early caveman art, was a picture of ‘early man’ pushing a shopping trolley. The caption, which was almost identical in design to the British Museum’s captions, read:

On his website Banksy announced a treasure hunt with a prize for the first person who could find the caveman’s art and send him a photograph of themselves standing beside it; but the
British Museum got there first, taking the caveman down before anyone could claim the prize. A spokeswoman for the British Museum
said they were ‘seeing the lighter side
of it’ and were ‘still in the process of deciding what to do with it’. Since then it has become part of internet folklore, reinforced by a statement in Banksy’s book, that
the caveman was taken into the museum’s permanent collection. However, a search of the permanent collection using key words such as ‘Banksy Maximus’, ‘Early Man goes to
Market’, ‘Post Catatonic’ and, of course, ‘Banksy’, yielded no results. It seems a pity to spoil the fun but the museum responded to my request for information by
saying, ‘It wasn’t acquired by the museum and isn’t in the collection.’ (In contrast, Riikka Kuittinen, then a curator in the print department at the Victoria & Albert
Museum, says she was really hoping that the V&A would get one. She says she would have marked it ‘accession into the collection’, stuck a number on it and put it into store. But the
artist never obliged and later the V&A had to buy its Banksy prints.)

These incursions were not only profitable in terms of publicity, they were – eventually – profitable financially. Banksy’s
Crimewatch UK
was placed in the Tate’s
lost property office after it fell down. Quite what happened to it after that is unclear. The Tate says that at this point it has no information about where it ended up. But only days after the
Tate incursion, another version of
Crimewatch UK
, complete with the video of it being hung, was being offered for sale by a gallery for £15,000. And six years later, yet another
version turned up on the walls of the Black Rat Gallery in Shoreditch; this version was owned by a private collector who had presumably bought it from Banksy. The gallery had received an offer of
£150,000 which the collector turned down. (There is a puzzle here. Banksy found the original painting in a street market and painted the police tapes over it; but he can’t have found
three
identical
paintings in the market. Somehow he must have transferred the image.
Similarly, a picture identical to that of the unfortunate society lady he used for
the New York Metropolitan Museum turned up four years later in his exhibition in Bristol, but her gas mask had been replaced by a child’s disguise: a big false nose, complete with a silly
moustache and funny glasses. She looked better in the gas mask.)

The rise of Banksy’s humble can of soup was just as swift as that of
Crimewatch UK
, Just three years after he had hung his first version in MOMA, a rather bigger version of the
painting (measuring 48 in × 36 in, it would have been difficult to smuggle into MOMA) fetched £117,600 at Bonhams, after two rival bidders had driven it rapidly beyond the estimated
price of £80,000. And this was at the height of the credit crunch. Certainly it was not the $15 million that wealthy friends of the Museum of Modern Art had paid for Warhol’s
32
Campbell’s Soup Cans
back in 1977. But this was fifteen years after Warhol had painted them and the price reflected the fact that Warhol’s soup cans, glorifying such an everyday
object, had come to be seen as changing the very nature of what was considered art. When Warhol had first painted his cans back in 1962, his new gallery in Los Angeles was trying to sell them at
$100 each – and failing. (Eventually the gallery bought the whole set for $1000, an extraordinarily good investment but not much of a return for Warhol.)

Although these gallery visits were to earn Banksy good money in the years to come, this was almost certainly the last thing he had in mind at the time. It seems strange to say this about an
artist who wishes to remain anonymous, but his incursions were about fame and recognition, about people who never went near a gallery or a museum seeing his pictures for the first time in
newspapers or on television, and especially on the web, enjoying them and looking out for them in the future. Very swiftly Banksy became the
first international artist of the
internet. His anonymity meant he could not hold big press conferences or give television interviews, so he announced his coup in New York on the internet by giving a set of pictures to
www.woostercollective.com, a New York site dedicated to street art of one kind or another.

He was not creating art on the internet, but he was building himself an immensely loyal following on the web, fans who were unlikely to visit a gallery but were more than happy to visit a
website. He now shows his new works on his own site, www.banksy.co.uk. He can thus be spraying walls in Israel, Hollywood, Barcelona or London and everyone can see what he has done – it gives
his art a lifespan that graffiti artists never had before. The wall might be painted over but the picture is still there. He can advertise his film, promote any new exhibition and through an
associated site, www.picturesonwalls.com, sell his own signed prints and those of other artists. And apart from Banksy’s own site a whole nest of other sites have sprung up to follow his
work, argue about who he is, put up photos of ‘a new Banksy’ they think they have spotted, discuss whether this piece is
really
a Banksy, track his prices, slam him and champion
him. In short, to give everyone a chance to feel they
share
some part of Banksy, even if they are not a millionaire with a Banksy on their sitting-room wall.

And beyond these dedicated fans, through both the mainstream press and the internet, Banksy had won for himself international recognition. Before he hit London, Paris and New York he was known
– he had for instance provided the cover illustration for Blur’s
Think Tank
album. But he was not
well
known; his first two small self-published books had been overlooked
by all but his most committed fans. Now, by reinventing the rules, he had become a known name, and he had done it in such a clever
way that he was not considered a publicity
seeker, but more a battler for the little guy against the all-powerful galleries and art dealers. Instead of ‘vandal’, descriptions of him like ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’
became common currency, culminating in the
Sunday Times
calling him ‘Our unlikeliest national treasure.’

There is simply no other artist who could command the cover and the inside pages of the
Sunday Times
magazine, followed a few months later by an ‘exclusive’ interview heralded
on the front page of the
Sun
. The fact that this
Sun
interview had simply been lifted word for word from the extras when his film,
Exit Through the Gift Shop
, was released on
DVD did not matter – except perhaps to Banksy. What mattered was the fact that the
Sun
considered him interesting enough to their readers to devote two pages to him. He had come a long
way in a short time from his early days in Bristol.

Two

Once Upon a Time

T
he Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town. Very white – probably no more than three black families had somehow
ended up there – working class, run down and not happy with strangers of any colour. A series of high-rise council flats had been plonked there in the 1950s and it had a reputation for drugs
and crime. The graffiti on the walls of Barton Hill shouted ‘Fuck the Pope’, but it was not a Protestant enclave, more an angry enclave. The National Front had got a foothold in the
estate and, as one of its old-time residents says, ‘No one was coming up here taking the piss.’