Banksy (13 page)

So why the anonymity? Banksy’s answer is usually twofold. One strand is the oft-repeated explanation with respect to the illegal nature of graffiti: he ‘has issues with the
cops’; authenticating a piece he has done on the street would be like ‘a signed confession’. He has said in the past, ‘I consider it to be a victimless crime what I do
generally, but the criminal side is important. Any piece of graffiti is saying you are not going to be told what to do and you’ll go out under your own steam and you’ll make the city
look the way you want it to look.’ Certainly graffiti is more than a game – if you paint often enough, as often as Banksy has done, there is a real chance that you will get locked up.
That’s the risk that gives it the essential adrenalin rush that most graffiti artists talk about, and that’s what they miss when they are painting on walls that have been provided as
legal spaces. There is a story among graffiti writers in America – impossible to tell whether it is true or not – that the police in Los Angeles used to try their hand as agents
provocateurs. They would put up their graffiti attempts on a wall then lie in wait for others to be tempted to put their tags up too. When graffiti writers duly arrived and contributed their own
tags and vamps, the police would come out of their hidey-hole and arrest them. The police, or more often the British Transport Police, are not desperate enough to become involved in this novel form
of entrapment but they are certainly after persistent offenders.

Take Sam Moore, twenty-four, of Newport in the Isle of Wight, known rather more romantically as 10Foot when he is writing his name across London. He is the complete
opposite of Banksy – for him the ‘getting up’ is everything – and he is widely admired in the graffiti community for what he has done. He hates Banksy and his stencils and
shows it by writing across his work. But in June 2010, before another graffiti ‘war’ could get going, 10Foot was arrested. He was let out on bail while the police used
‘handwriting analysis’ to link him with further tags, yet even in the months while they were carrying out this analysis he carried on painting with grim but foolhardy determination,
only adding to his troubles. Eventually he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges of criminal damage carried out over three years and was jailed for just over two years, receiving in addition a
five-year ASBO which prevents him from carrying an extraordinary range of implements starting with any form of ‘unset paint’ and expanding through ‘shoe dye, grinding stone and
glass etching equipment’. So if you are caught bombing the town, the consequences are now much more severe than in the days of Operation Anderson twenty years ago.

Banksy himself has largely managed to stay out of trouble. He has always remained vague about his record, but Shepard Fairey, who has somehow succeeded in remaining at the pinnacle of street art
in America while at the same time carrying on a very successful design business, says that Banksy has ‘never been busted to the point of potentially not being able to do street art.’
Translated, this means that he has never been fined or imprisoned on the scale of 10Foot where a subsequent offence would mean a huge fine or an even longer sentence. Piecing together what Banksy
has either written or told interviewers, it appears that he was arrested once, many years ago, in New York, for painting a
picture about corruption on a billboard. ‘As a
result I spent 40 hours in a cell with the cops taking the piss and telling me lies, followed by a spell of community service and hefty fine.’

In the late 1990s he spent a couple of years on and off in New York, usually staying at the Carlton Arms Hotel on East 25th Street, just north of the East Village, which had once been a port in
a storm for welfare families, drug dealers and hookers of various descriptions before it cleaned up its act. As the hotel grew smarter, different artists were invited to decorate its fifty-four
rooms – in return they got to stay in the hotel for free during the time they were painting. The room that Banksy painted has since been painted over by other artists but his bright, cartoony
work along part of the corridor still exists. The hotel’s general manager, John Ogren, says, ‘We knew him when he was just beginning and he is one of the kindest, funniest, genuine, and
genuinely talented artists I know.’

Not everyone felt that way. Banksy told one interviewer: ‘You’d imagine that certain folk would kinda be on your side. But I was grassed up by some transsexual hooker looking to
score brownie points with the NYPD.’ In another version of the same story he said, ‘You tend to think that certain people are on your side, but obviously they ain’t . . . I got
badly busted on that one. I had about seven cops raid me on a rooftop.’

But it is very difficult to imagine Banksy getting arrested now and being let out on bail while handwriting analysts decide which are genuine Banksys and which are fakes. Even prosecutors appear
to put him in a different class from other graffiti artists. In June 2011 Daniel Halpin, a 26-year-old from Camden, north London, was finally brought to court on seven charges of criminal damage.
Halpin was a prolific artist known as TOX, the scourge of
Transport for London, who sprayed his tag wherever he could find a space, and the prosecution, in trying to explain
TOX’s ubiquity, told the jury: ‘He is no Banksy. He doesn’t have the artistic skills, so he has to get his tag up as much as possible.’ Quite apart from this
misunderstanding of graffiti – the tagger’s desire for maximum exposure, never mind if this means exchanging quality for quantity – it also seemed to put Banksy on an almost
untouchable level, even though his art is just as illegal as Tox’s. In the summer of 2011 Tox was jailed for twenty-seven months, the judge telling him: ‘There has to be a deterrent
aspect. These offences have gone on, in your own admission, since the year 2000 . . .’ That period is only a little shorter than Banksy’s career.

It has now reached the point where Banksy might still want to see himself as a bit of a vandal, but actually he is becoming something of a tourist attraction. When he painted a wall in north
London in support of Tox, it was very rapidly covered in Perspex by the wall’s owner. When he painted new work in Bristol and Croydon, both councils held back the graffiti clean-up squads and
gave their citizens a chance to vote: should ‘the Banksy’ stay or go? After one early Banksy was whitewashed over by mistake, a councillor in Bristol proposed a register of outdoor
artworks across the city to help protect them.

In Bristol the Banksy effect has turned graffiti into something of a growth industry, with one council officer suggesting the city now has three main tourist attractions: an old boat, a bridge
(Brunel’s SS
Great Britain
and his Clifton suspension bridge), and graffiti. The council now sponsors various legal graffiti events, the latest, in the summer of 2011, being an
£80,000 extravaganza called See No Evil which turned the buildings in a drab street in the city centre into what the council hopes will become the biggest
permanent
street art gallery in Europe. The irony was that the man heading this project was Inkie, who twenty-two years earlier, during Operation Anderson, had been the key police target in the fight against
graffiti, and the buildings painted included the juvenile and magistrate courts where Inkie and others who were arrested back then had made their first appearance in court.

As part of a difficult balancing act the council has produced a nine-page policy document on how to deal with graffiti, promising that in some instances there will be consultation on whether
graffiti should be removed while warning that ‘consultation is not a referendum’. In the first example of this consultation, back in 2006, 93 per cent of the people who voted wanted the
work that Banksy had sprayed on the side of the Young People’s Sexual Health Clinic – a naked man hanging from a window ledge to avoid a cuckolded husband – to be saved. So it is
still there, now more under threat from fellow vandals with a paintball gun than from the council.

In Hastings Banksy painted a picture of a girl building sandcastles, making it look as though she had painstakingly pricked the word TESCO on the side of each castle. It might not have been one
of his outstanding works but it was certainly a Banksy. The council’s anti-graffiti team was about to wash it clean when first the local paper and then the council stepped in. Jay Kramer, the
deputy leader of the council, said, ‘I know that we have a zero tolerance policy on graffiti, and that is absolutely right. However, we have to be flexible so on this occasion I have agreed
that Banksy can be an exception to our rule and can stay.’ It is ironic that ever since having made this exception, the council has been trying to protect its Banksy first with Perspex and,
when that was smashed, with some sort of protective spray. Other graffiti writers, who no
doubt have suffered in the past from the council’s zero tolerance rule, see no
reason why Banksy should be treated any differently.

So, since Banksy is now being both tolerated and protected by councils, it would be more of an embarrassment than anything else if he was actually arrested. It is the second strand of
Banksy’s argument for anonymity which today is the more convincing one. At the time when his film
Exit Through the Gift Shop
was being launched in America, he told a Los Angeles
journalist – anonymously: ‘Charlie Chaplin used to say “once I talk, I’m like any other comic.” I figured I’d follow his lead.’ Several years earlier he
had expounded at greater length on the theme: ‘I have no interest in ever coming out. I figure there are enough self-opinionated assholes trying to get their ugly little faces in front of you
as it is. You ask a lot of kids today what they want to be when they grow up and they say “I want to be famous.” You ask them for what reason and they don’t know or care. I think
Andy Warhol got it wrong: in the future so many people are going to become famous that one day everybody will end up being anonymous for fifteen minutes.’

But there is more to it than this rant, interesting though it is. At the time of the launch of
Exit
, he also said: ‘I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of
their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.’ His good friend Shepard Fairey, whose statements sometimes make him sound a little critical, says, ‘Banksy
cares very much about selling art and what people think of him and he understands thoroughly that people’s fantasy is a far better marketing tool than reality.’ In 2010 Banksy told the
Sunday Times
: ‘Sometimes it might seem like an elaborate public relations stunt, but the anonymity is completely vital to my work, without it I couldn’t paint.’ While this
was
certainly true in his early days in Bristol, it is not entirely true today when a considerable portion of his work comes straight out of his studio on to canvas,
bypassing the street entirely. Anonymity, once a necessity, has become something of a marketing tool, for having stumbled into fame he has become remarkably adept in knowing how to use it.

It is a marketing tool he came across more by chance than design. At the end of the 1990s he was painting the side of a lorry at Glastonbury – Inkie was doing the lettering – and it
became something of an open-air performance show, with no attempt to disguise who he was. But by 2000, when he gave a short interview to the BBC to publicise the opening of his exhibition in the
Severnshed restaurant in Bristol, he had retreated into anonymity, although he was not using any of the voice distortion devices he uses now. (His voice sounds so ordinary on this tape, with just a
gentle hint of the West Country in it, that you wonder why he bothers with voice distortion unless it is to increase the drama.) What he discovered was that anonymity created its own interest. An
anonymous bad artist will remain just that and no one will have any interest in who he might be; but combining Banksy’s talent with anonymity produced a remarkable effect.

Acoris Andipa, who has put on a succession of hugely successful Banksy exhibitions in his gallery in Knightsbridge – much to the chagrin of the Banksy camp, who certainly do not want to be
associated with a Knightsbridge gallery – says: ‘I think he operates on a very simple basis. He creates his work. He has no interest in being a celebrity. The fact that he has no
interest has made him into a celebrity.’ Would it make a difference if he wasn’t anonymous? ‘I just don’t believe there would be much impact on his appeal and therefore his
market prices.’ But my own feeling is
that his anonymity creates a buzz, an interest, a talking point. It widens his appeal and certainly increases the value of his
prints, and possibly of his original canvases too. If you are in the street art world you know who Swoon, Faile, Fairey, Vhils, Inkie, ESPO, Blu, Mode2, Invader, Paul Insect and many, many others
are; but to outsiders often the only name on the menu is Banksy. Would Banksy have been so successful if we all knew who he was? Probably not. I believe his talent is such that he would have
achieved his success eventually, but it would have taken him much longer to get noticed by the wider world.

He is often likened to Andy Warhol, encouraged by his choice of subjects: where Warhol painted Marilyn Monroe, Banksy painted Kate Moss; where Warhol painted Campbell’s soup, Banksy
painted Tesco’s soup. But in many ways they are complete opposites. Warhol bought his first house from the proceeds of his commercial work, mainly shoe ads but also ads for just about any
other kind of ‘ladies’ accessories’. Banksy does not now accept commercial commissions. Warhol was desperate for gallery space; Banksy usually avoids it. Warhol loved celebrity
and celebrities; Banksy can’t stand them. Warhol, famously, would attend every fashionable event he could find: ‘He would go to the opening of a drawer,’ a friend once said of
him. Banksy won’t even attend his own opening, let alone anyone else’s.

And yet they have both profited from the whiff of mystery that wafts around them. In his early days at least, Warhol preferred the telephone to a face-to-face encounter; Banksy now has the added
armour of email, which he prefers to either the telephone or a face-to-face interview. The vaguer Warhol’s responses to interviews became, the more they increased his appeal; the photographer
Duane Michals told the authors of
Pop
, one of the key books on
Warhol, how surprised he was to see him ‘cloaked in this air of mystery that people applied to him
as if he was some sort of Zen philosopher and everything he said was a koan.’ Banksy is not so vague, but he only answers the emailed questions he wants to and leaves the rest blank. Happily
he is not treated as any sort of philosopher, but nevertheless his occasional pronouncements, however mundane, gain him at least as much importance – and notice – as any other British
artist of his generation.