Banksy (37 page)

His 2009 exhibition in Bristol required neither a thesis nor a short explanation, just a vaguely jokey map showing (roughly) where to find his pieces among the museum’s other work. In
contrast, a year later the Saatchi Gallery staged an exhibition of the new generation of British artists, Newspeak: British Art Now, where it was easy to feel completely left out of the loop
without the excellent notes that accompanied the exhibition. Faced with Rupert Norfolk’s
Wall 2006
, consisting of 125 carved limestone rocks, it was comforting to read in the notes
that the work requires ‘curiosity and an investment of time to be fully appreciated’. But other works required more than that. For Pablo Bronstein’s
Monument in the Style of
Michael Graves on the Debris of the Bastille
, the notes told us that the painting is based on Jean-Pierre Louis Laurent Houël’s
The Storming of the Bastille
given ‘a
facelift à la pomo architect Michael Graves’ to present an ‘alternate history’. But what if you don’t know that? The painting does not really survive without the
explanation. The late Cy Twombly produced work that was, according to
The Times
’s headline writer, ‘Graffiti of the Gods’; but after visiting an exhibition of Twombly and
Nicolas Poussin’s work at Dulwich and reading the gallery guidance – ‘the jittery tangles of pencil seemingly caught between
an utterance and a
stutter’ – I was still mystified, left with a feeling that Twombly’s work was for scholars rather than spectators.

With Banksy no one is made to feel inferior. And that’s a considerable relief, relief born from the fact that we don’t have to figure out the meaning of Twombly’s stutters,
Hirst’s spots or Tracey Emin’s tampons (actually Tracey Emin often explains things for us in long handwritten notes that accompany some of her pieces).

Riikka Kuittinen, who acquired several Banksy prints to add to the V&A’s continually updated Print Collection, is one who uses ‘accessible’ as a term of approval. Having
first seen his work on the streets, she was overjoyed to find he produced prints as well. ‘People get it. It appeals to a wide range. You don’t have to know anything about anything
necessarily to get it and I think contemporary art, sometimes unfairly, has this reputation of being difficult, whereas Banksy’s work isn’t difficult . . . I don’t think
accessible means bad at all. The Van Gogh show at the Royal Academy would have got how many thousands of people visiting and still the work is good. Because something is popular doesn’t mean
it’s bad.’

So yes, Banksy’s work is much easier for the viewer than many of his contemporaries’, and while the critics might not like it he has managed to attract a whole new audience into the
art world. It can get embarrassing at times. The
Boston Globe
interviewed a cyclist who had ridden over to see a new Banksy put up to publicise
Exit Through the Gift Shop
in the
spring of 2010. ‘I have never seen something like this in Boston before,’ said this fan, who was in his early twenties. ‘It gives Boston a strange sense of worth.’ How could
Boston with all its history need Banksy to give it a sense of worth? But the Croydon builder buying a Banksy wall, many of
the crowd queuing for hours to get into the Bristol
Museum, the financial adviser turned gallery owner, Banksy’s followers on the web, are all new converts to the incredibly broad church who have been gathered from the wilderness by Banksy and
led into the art world.

In 2011 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) put on the most far-reaching display of ‘street art and graffiti’ yet seen. It was three years behind Tate Modern’s
exhibition but it set out to be considerably more comprehensive. Banksy was there in impressive style, but so were about fifty other artists. The exhibition could certainly have survived without
Banksy but it is impossible to believe that it would have happened in the first place but for the Banksy effect – the drawing power that both his painting and his film have given the street
art world.

Matt Gleason, who runs the web-based
Coagula Art Journal
, admitted, ‘I wanted to trash this show,’ but in a generally favourable review he called it ‘a show meant for
people who don’t go to museums . . . it was also MOCA putting all those academic artists on notice that “you are no longer welcome, you are no longer wanted.” Your art world is
over, your theory is dead. We want bodies here, we want popular artists, popularity. We want a critical mass and you are not going to get that with a lot of minimal art, you are not going to get
that with a lot of abstract painting.’

One thing he noticed at the preview for the show was that people would walk up to artists and ask for their autograph – another sign, as the
Financial Times
had noted a year
earlier, that ‘art and artists are attracting the fans, the adulation, the attention – and the bank balances – that were once the terrain of rock stars.’ It was an
exhibition, Gleason said, that signalled, ‘This is
the new art world and it already has its own art history dating way back.’

Of course the contemporary art world is not over – as Gleason suggests it might be – but Banksy has almost single-handedly produced a new art world for a new audience, running
alongside the existing world and now, slowly but surely, within it. And there is room for both.

Banksy’s problem lies not in his art but in the fact that he now makes considerable money from this art market and the fans who collected him from the beginning can no longer afford him.
Richard Wright can say ‘I like all my work to disappear’ and then sell his work on paper via Gagosian and no one seems bothered in the slightest. But it sometimes seems as though Banksy
is almost considered a criminal for making money from his art. He himself recognises the problem, telling
Time Out
in New York: ‘I wouldn’t want to be remembered as the guy who
contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities. I do sometimes question whether I’m part of the solution or part of the problem . . . There’s
obviously nothing wrong with selling your art – only an idiot with a trust fund would tell you otherwise. But it’s confusing to know how far you should take it.’

On the one hand he has to deal with the likes of the Splashers, a short-lived group with, one suspects, a minimal membership, which sprang up in New York towards the end of 2006 and was
dedicated to splashing paint over street works by the likes of Swoon, Shepard Fairey and Banksy. The Splashers called the work of such street artists ‘a trough for gallery owners and
critics’, arguing that once street art is introduced into the museum or the advertising world it becomes nothing more than ‘bourgeois-sponsored rebellion . . . both utterly impotent
politically and
fantastically lucrative for everyone involved’. (The Splashers attempted to make sure that none of their work would find its way into collectors’
hands by adding a short warning at the bottom of the communiqués they pasted over or next to a piece of street art. It read: ‘The removal of this document may result in injury, as we
have mixed the wheatpaste with tiny shards of glass.’)

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.