Banksy (25 page)

Eventually I was let in to two floors of Banksarama. This, like his other Ghetto shows, was anything but a white-walled space. There was
no
space on any wall; every inch was taken in a
deliberate jumble of work, while the basement was given over to Dran, a vaguely subversive French street artist many of whose works were painted on cardboard. In amongst all this, but not given any
special prominence, was the print of the hoodie with his dog – it now had a name,
Choose Your Weapon
. This surely was too good to be true, a Banksy print there for me after only half
an hour’s queuing. Of course it was a fantasy: you could look but you could not buy.

For that you had to wait for the off, announced via email by Banksy’s gallery. And Banksy was teasing yet again, for almost
every day there was a new email to be
found from the gallery, frustratingly titillating, announcing the release of more prints from the show, but none of them by Banksy. Finally the day arrived. The price was £450. There were 175
available online – the names would be drawn by lottery, so I did not have to sit up all night hitting the refresh button. Or if you wanted to go down to queue all night at the gallery, there
would be another 200 on sale.

I have to confess that the thought of an all-night queue in December in Shoreditch was too much for me. I applied online. And, reading the blog artonanisland.blogspot.com, I was very glad I did.
The blogger, Evan Schiff, a Californian in his early thirties who had been living in London for three years, heard the rumour that the print was about to be released, so at 9 p.m. on Friday night
he hurried down to Soho. He was about 180th in line! An hour and a half later the news was out: the prints would go on sale the next morning but they would be sold from Banksy’s gallery,
Pictures on Walls in Shoreditch.

‘You’ve never seen so many people move that fast’, he blogged. ‘People running through the streets of central London trying to buy cabs from others who were waiting. I
started a mad dash with two guys who were in back of me in line. They had a car and I did a few calculations and thought I’d get there quickest with them. I reckon it took about twenty-five
minutes. We parked about three blocks before POW’s showroom. In a dead sprint we ran to the queue and when the dust settled, ended up being about 150th in line. Result!

‘Having come straight from work I wasn’t prepared for the cold at all. No sleeping bag, no long underwear, I hadn’t even worn my scarf that day. However, nervous that in the 10
minutes it would take for me to run home they’d pass out tickets and I’d miss out, I
stayed the course.

‘The night from 2–6am was fairly uneventful save for the odd fight (two that I counted) or figuring out who was gonna walk across the street to get tea (which started the night at
about 50p a cup and ended the night at a pound a cup). However, at about 6:30 our second bout of absolute bedlam. A security guard/POW person showed up with tickets. And the queue absolutely
imploded. People from the back running to the front, people at the front trying to fight them off. And perhaps worst of all, CARLOADS of people pulling up and walking right up to the ticket dude
and getting their tickets. It was terrible.’ He was being pushed further and further down the queue.

‘Once all the touts and queue jumpers were sorted out the fat bald security guy started making his way through the line. I was nervous as hell, cracked out from being up all night, and
just hoping me and the people I was with would be sorted out. As he came closer to us (I was about 10 people away at this point) he got to number 170 and said “that’s it, that’s
the last number.”

‘Devastation. I can’t believe I waited that bloody long for NOTHING.’

He had started on his way home when a couple of people who were behind him in the queue stopped their taxi and told him to get in. They had heard a hint that there might be a few more prints on
sale back at Marks & Stencils. He arrived there to find he was number seventeen in the queue. This time they established their own rules, drawing numbers on everyone’s hand.

‘At 9am, the first employee showed up and we went up to him. “We’re here, we will gladly go home, please just tell us if we can buy a print here.” “We have 60
prints for you here.” Absolute bedlam. He passes out tickets and for the next few hours we all
sat around telling stories, talking art, and really enjoying each
other’s company.

‘When my number was eventually called to go in and buy my print, I pumped my fist and walked in to the store.’ He had his Banksy. He says now that it is not his favourite Banksy
image but ‘it was my first Banksy and one that will be on my wall for ever.’

The Banksy queue has become something of a club. One successful member of this ‘club’ says, ‘You got to remember we meet every year and there are people there you’ve met
at the last sale and they just come up to you saying “Oh, how you doing?”; it’s lovely, it’s a really nice community, but the problem you’ve got is that before I had
collected my print of
Choose Your Weapon
somebody at the front of the queue had already put theirs on eBay for £10,000.’ He says the
Choose Your Weapon
queue was the only
bad queue he has experienced: ‘There were fights and all sorts, it was scary.’ And while in a way it seems amazing to queue all night for a piece of art, in many ways it seems rather
more admirable (and profitable too, if you want it to be) than queuing all night for, say, a football ticket or a good view of the royal wedding or the New Year sales. (Banksy eventually issued a
further edition of fifty-eight prints in ‘Queue Jumper Edition (Warm Grey)’ for those who missed out in the scrum at Shoreditch and had their names and details taken by one of his
staff.) As for me, I stayed warm and comfortable, but unhappily my number never came up in the online lottery.

Banksy took close to £200,000 for this one print but did not keep any of it for himself. He donated all the money from the proceeds to the Russian art collective Voina –
war
in Russian – which performs public protest happenings that include everything from orgies to throwing cats at bored McDonald’s workers on
International
Workers’ Day. When he decided to make the donation, two of Voina’s members were in jail charged with aggravated hooliganism and facing a prison sentence of up to five years. Lucy Ash
had reported on their deeds on the BBC’s
From Our Own Correspondent
, detailing how they had painted an erect penis on a drawbridge across the River Neva in St Petersburg. Every time
the drawbridge opened, the penis, 65m tall and 27m across, was there in all its glory opposite the building which is the local headquarters of the KGB’s successors, the Federal Security
Service. (The penis reached a shortlist for a state prize for contemporary art, mysteriously slipping off the list and then reemerging as the winner, with $14,000 being awarded to the group.)
Rather more seriously, the group had overturned seven police cars in protest against police corruption.

Banksy must have been one of the people listening to her report, for soon afterwards she was in Italy about to interview the mayor of an impoverished hilltop village when her mobile rang.
‘It felt a bit surreal and I wondered at first if the call was a hoax,’ she reported. ‘After all, it is not every day you get phoned up by one of the world’s most elusive
artists.’ It was not actually Banksy but his ubiquitous PR Jo Brooks, who told her that Banksy wanted to help.

‘How much do you reckon it’ll cost,’ Brooks asked, ‘to get them out?’

‘Uncharacteristically, I was lost for words. I mumbled that I was not sure whether he could help get them out of prison, but that I was certain that the artists would be most grateful for
his support.’

In very simple terms the donation worked – and there was still a lot of it to spend, which they say will in turn be used to help ‘political prisoners’. Early in 2011, after
almost four months in jail, they were released, having posted bail of 300,000 roubles, about
£6500 each. Although their troubles were far from over, Banksy had secured
their release from prison, even if he could not get rid of the charges against them. He had also raised their profile across the web to a level they could never have dreamed of, and this perhaps
had made them just a little safer.

There are many ways Banksy could make more money. He could take a few of the commercial jobs offered to him – if Blek le Rat can don a Hugo Boss suit to judge a Hugo Boss stencil
competition, then why not Banksy at what would probably be a much higher price? He could license the Banksy brand. He could put up the price of his prints. He could keep more of the money he does
make by cutting back on the eclectic range of good causes he supports. He could accept the sort of interior commissions now on offer – the late Gunter Sachs’ castle at Lake Worth in
Austria is one of the best examples of graffiti taken on to inside walls. Yet even though he does none of these things he still can’t win, he will still be accused of being a sell-out. Thus
he remembers the time he went to see the film
Precious
, where they played the trailer for
Exit Through the Gift Shop
before the main feature. It was not an enjoyable experience:
‘Someone two rows in front shouted “OH MY GOD, BANKSY IS SUCH A SELL-OUT” and I shrank into my seat.’

Ever since starting this book I have been getting Banksy birthday cards and Banksy Christmas cards and plain Banksy cards from friends who thought I needed encouragement. Banksy makes no money
out of those at all. The graffiti is ‘attributed to Banksy’ but the copyright of the photograph of Banksy’s work is with the photographer and the card company. All the mugs, the
cards, the cheaply printed canvases, the iPod skins, the laptop covers, the Banksy buttons, even the ‘Banksy style’ decorative wall stickers,
are rip-offs. The
producers of all these money-spinners are no doubt encouraged by the words of Banksy himself who told the
Sunday Times
‘if you’ve built a reputation on having a casual attitude
towards property ownership, it seems a bit bad-mannered to kick off about copyright law.’ Unless he has some secret licensing deal, which seems very unlikely indeed, he has nothing to do with
any of them; he just happens to produce the art on the streets for others to profit from.

While the souvenirs could possibly be money-making ventures for him, he could make much bigger money if he was prepared to do commercial work. For, as graffiti crosses over to the mainstream
– brand managers now reference his work as ‘intelligent mischief’ – there could be no greater prize than having Banksy as your figurehead.

As far back as 2003 he was being courted for advertising jobs. The
Guardian
’s Simon Hattenstone asked him if there was work he would turn down on principle. He replied: ‘Yeah,
I’ve turned down four Nike jobs now. Every new campaign they email me to ask me to do something about it. I haven’t done any of those jobs. The list of jobs I haven’t done now is
so much bigger than the list of jobs I have done. It’s like a reverse CV, kinda weird. Nike have offered me mad money for doing stuff.’

‘Never’ is a dangerous word to use, but three years later he told his friend Shepard Fairey: ‘I don’t do anything for anybody any more, and I will never do a commercial
job again.’ He explained in some detail why he had done the cover for the Blur album, not that anyone was accusing him of selling out over that. ‘I’ve done a few things to pay the
bills, and I did the Blur album. It was a good record and it was quite a lot of money. I think that’s a really important distinction to make. If it’s something you actually
believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial. Otherwise you’ve got to be a socialist rejecting capitalism altogether,
because the idea that you can marry a quality product with a quality visual and be a part of that even though it’s capitalistic is sometimes a contradiction you can’t live with. But
sometimes it’s perfectly symbiotic, like the Blur situation.’

Very early on in his career he said, ‘I’m kind of old fashioned in that I like to eat so it’s always good to earn money.’ He does make good money, but he could both make
more and keep more than he does. ‘I have been called a sell-out but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want. I think it was easier when I was the underdog, and
I had a lot of practice at it,’ he told the
New Yorker
. ‘The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that’s an easy problem to solve –
you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for
me.’ He went on, ‘I love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies.’

There is no Banksy Foundation giving away money publicly; it’s all done on a very ad hoc basis, with no ostentation. This makes it completely impossible to give a fair picture of what he
gives away. But at one end there is the £1.5 million raised at the New York charity auction. At the other end there are the smaller gifts, like the hand-finished print of
Nola
(a young
girl sheltering from the rain under her umbrella, originally put up in New Orleans to commemorate the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina) which sold for almost £7000 at the annual art
auction that Inkie organises to raise funds for a complicated operation for deaf children at Great Ormond Street hospital. It all adds up.

Apart from Voina there was £165,000 for Sightsavers from the release of the print
Flag
in 2006/7. There was a further £25,000 he raised for Sightsavers
in 2008 by organising a raffle at his gallery when he released his new limited edition print
Very Little Helps
. The tickets cost £1 each with a maximum of twenty per person, and people
queued for up to three hours to buy them. This raffle is another good measure of his following, for these were not tickets to win the print but simply to win the right to
buy
the print.
Among the auction of original work, there was the £30,000 raised for Moorfields Eye Hospital and another £30,000 for a drop-in centre for asylum seekers run by the New North London
Synagogue.