Banksy (28 page)

They had used multiple eBay accounts and email addresses as well as the various Banksy forums on the web. Both had been genuine Banksy fans for years before they started faking him, so they knew
what they were talking about, and according to the prosecution if they were seriously challenged by a buyer they tried blinding them with science. If that failed, on occasions they would actually
refund the buyer their money. Once they even provided a genuine Banksy as a replacement to a buyer who had complained bitterly about the one they sold him being a fake.

The police found the printer, who was doing a very fine job in faking Banksys. Printing them was not a criminal offence – passing them off as Banksys was. ‘Faking a Banksy is not a
very difficult process but they were perfect forgeries,’ says Keith Sekree. ‘When I found out my
Turf War
was a forgery we took it out of the frame and weighed it and it was a
quarter of a gram out compared to the genuine one. They even did a good job sourcing the paper, and sourcing the blind stamp.’ A couple of their greatest hits were
Golf Sale
, which
went to an American for £6500, and
Monkey Queen
, bought by a Spaniard for £4500. Again both were from 2003, when
a high percentage of a Banksy edition were
unsigned. In total the police discovered 120 fakes, with an estimated value of £200,000, half still with Howard and Parker and half recovered from their victims – there may well be
other victims out there who still don’t know their prints are fakes.

When you think about it, the very idea of faking a live artist seems absurd. A dead artist is one thing: he or she is not here any more to stand up and say ‘That’s not mine.’
But a live artist? It has to be the fact that the perpetrators thought they could rely on Banksy the vandal never appearing in court to denounce them. For there were other fakers too. In Coventry
Robert McGarry, aged twenty-seven, bought four ‘Banksys’ at a car boot sale for £300. He claimed to the court that he believed they were all genuine Banksy prints, but if that was
the case he must have thought he had got a truly wonderful bargain. There was only one problem: he didn’t have any provenance to support his belief that they were genuine. So he simply forged
certificates to authenticate them. Over a period of eight months he managed to sell all four prints, using different eBay accounts:
Barcode
went for £7100 to a doctor in December 2007,
Girl With Balloon
for £1515 in January 2008 (maybe my
Girl With Balloon
would be worth that if I had slightly more impressive provenance than receipts from the copy shop and
John Lewis).
Love Rat
went for £842 in June 2008. Finally
B&W Trolley Hunters
fetched £1700 in August 2008. The court reports gave a dry account of all this, but some
of the pain comes out on Banksyforum, where one post reads: ‘This little fucker ripped a few people off including yours truly. I was the mug who bought the Trolley Hunters.’

McGarry admitted the four charges and got away with a 32-week sentence, suspended for two years, and 120 hours of unpaid
work. The prosecution accepted his story that he
believed the prints were genuine and it was this that saved him from going to prison.

In 2007 the temptation to flog what in this case were ‘unauthorised’ Banksy prints became too much even for a few of the people working for him.
The Art Newspaper
reported
that employees of Pictures on Walls were selling prints themselves and hiking the price up on eBay. Since the prints were not part of the limited edition, the most likely explanation for their
existence was that they were part of the standard overrun – printer’s proofs or artist’s proofs or both – which come with any such edition.

Banksy’s lawyers were indignant and very earnest, while in contrast Banksy himself adopted a completely different tone – almost as though he was enjoying it. His lawyers’
statement read in part: ‘It appears that in spite of strict fiscal controls and strict controls of the physical prints that 25 bad prints have been sold on eBay. Pictures on Walls have called
on eBay to assist in tracing these sales and also in tracing the money which will inexorably lead to those that have cynically betrayed the trust of the public, the artist and the
company.’

Banksy however suggested: ‘They say it’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody, but I don’t think that applies to art prints. If it turns out that limited editions
have not been limited in edition then I sincerely apologise. This is particularly unfortunate for the people who buy my work to flip it for a quick profit on eBay, as I wouldn’t want to
affect their mark-up.’ It was almost as though, whatever his staff and his lawyers might say, he quite enjoyed the idea that some of the people who bought his art for a quick profit might
have lost out.

In the end Pictures on Walls said they had been ‘unable to find any evidence of a serial fraud being conducted by current or
former members of staff as has been
alleged. We are aware former staff have sold a number of prints via eBay, but we have found nothing to indicate these prints were issued fraudulently.’ They promised compensation for anybody
who had been supplied ‘a faulty piece of art’.

(Innocent mistakes can happen. In 2004
Heavy Weaponry
– an elephant with a missile strapped to its back – sold at Bloomsbury Auctions for £25,000. It was one of
Banksy’s stencils on canvas, in an edition of twenty-five, and this one was numbered 12. Twelve days later
Heavy Weaponry
sold at Bonhams for £32,000. It was the same painting
from the same edition of twenty-five, but unfortunately it had the same edition number – 12. Embarrassingly, someone in the Banksy team had simply messed up.)

Nevertheless things had to change, and they did. In January 2008 a new Banksy company was established, 100 per cent owned by Pictures on Walls. Pest Control Office Limited is its full name, but
it is known by everyone in the street art world as Pest Control. Now, for £65 you can get your Banksy print authenticated. And just to keep the whole thing as jokey as possible, the
authentication certificate has stapled to it half a ‘Di faced tenner’, a £10 note faked by Banksy with Lady Diana’s face on it. The tenner has a handwritten ID number on it
which can be matched to the number on the other half of the note held by Pest Control. A fake to prove that you do indeed have the genuine article – what could be more Banksy than that?

And as for the pests, people like me who want information or, more usually, people who have taken Banksy pieces off the streets – whether in the form of doors, shutters, bollards, traffic
cones or walls – and want them authenticated as a Banksy, we all get banished into outer darkness. Hence Pest Control. The company
has had a dramatic impact on cleaning
up the market, but at the same time it has infuriated those who possess what are undoubtedly genuine Banksys but which Pest Control refuses to authenticate as genuine.

Twelve

Psst . . . Anyone Want to Buy a Wall?

B
anksy gets around, and wherever he goes he usually leaves his mark. Whereas earlier in his short career his work usually remained in place only
until it was washed away by clean-up squads or tagged out of existence by other graffiti writers, now there is a third option: Banksy has become so valuable that it can be worth taking the wall
down and selling it – a real piece of street art in your own home or office.

Every Banksy wall tells a different story. So I made a list of his walls and other such surfaces which have been sold, are up for sale, or have disappeared and are likely to appear on the market
one day. Although this list is certainly incomplete, it gives some idea of what Banksy sees as a problem, and the wall’s owners see as a good way to make a pile of money from a piece of
graffiti that is – sometimes literally – on their doorstep.

There is a rat declaring, ‘I’M OUT OF BED AND DRESSED – WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?’ painted on the outside of a building in Los Angeles at the time of his exhibition there
– Banksy’s film gives a fascinating glimpse of him cutting out the stencils for it and then putting it up. There is a water tank, also in
Los Angeles, painted
when he was looking for publicity days before the 2011 Oscar ceremony; there are the two pieces from a Yorkshire farm produced when Banksy was creating the artwork for Blur’s
Observer
Music Monthly
cover: part of the farmer’s gate (sold) and a section of the wall of a cattle barn (unsold). There are two snogging policemen somehow taken off the wall of a pub in Brighton
and replaced by a copy. There is a mural of four pensioners all hooded up with a boom box and a zimmer frame, peeled off a wall in Clerkenwell, London. There are three walls from Bethlehem: the
Israeli soldier demanding a donkey’s identity papers, a pigtailed young girl dressed in pink frisking an Israeli soldier and a wet dog shaking itself dry.

There is a punk having trouble with a self-assembly pack marked IEAK, close enough to the IKEA store in Croydon for the connection to be very obvious; there is the steel side of a
newsagent’s stall in Tottenham Court Road, London, and a piece of marine ply hoarding from a building site in Liverpool. There is a Banksy boy on a wall salvaged from Islington, north London
before the building was knocked down for redevelopment (it was close to a piece by the New York artists Faile – who command a price in the same region as Banksy – which at one point was
being offered ‘free’ with the Banksy). There is a wall in the midst of disintegrating Detroit which was painted to publicise the opening of his film. There is an advertising billboard
in Los Angeles, painted like the rat in the run-up to the Oscars, which Banksy altered by inserting a frisky Mickey Mouse groping the billboard’s original barely clad model. On the web you
can see two men come close to a fight as they battle for ownership of the billboard. Two further wall pieces in LA, also from his Oscar campaign, were swiftly cut out and should appear on the
market at some point. Another
website has a film of a Banksy wall being cut down in Jamaica; a lot of drink appears to have been consumed and it is a miracle that neither the
wall nor its handlers were injured. So the Banksy wall industry is showing reasonable growth, and very occasionally amidst all the hype a wall actually gets sold.

Entertainingly, the
Los Angeles Times
’s architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne compared the selling of these Banksy walls to the auctioning of some of the furniture and other
bits and pieces from Chandigarh, the extraordinary city 180 miles north of Delhi that Le Corbusier designed in the 1950s. For example a Corbusier-designed manhole cover has been auctioned for
almost $20,000 and a concrete light fixture from the city’s zoo fetched $36,000.

Hawthorne acknowledged that in Banksy’s case, where the American pieces nearly all appeared at around the time
Exit Through the Gift Shop
was released or during the run-up to the
Oscars, it is ‘nearly impossible to tell where the art-making ends and the marketing begins’. But then he elevated the argument on to a different plane, far away from Banksy’s
casual beginnings: ‘A broader and frankly more compelling issue is how these two stories turn inside out the relationship between patrimony and exploitation, and between local heritage and
colonial privilege. It is one thing when occupying British forces forcibly remove an artwork from its setting, as they did two centuries ago with the Elgin Marbles, and ship it out of the country.
It is something else entirely when the pieces at risk were created by outsiders, and locals are the ones rushing to loot as well as protect them.’

When architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Henry Greene designed private homes, Hawthorne said, they often designed not only the building but also ‘furniture, fixtures,
carpets
and other interior elements meant to be inseparable from their architectural containers. Pieces from such houses now fill the collections of museums around the
world.’

Dismantling such ‘architectural masterworks’, however upsetting, at least took them from the ‘private, moneyed domestic realm to the public sphere of the museum gallery’.
But the journeys of Banksy and Le Corbusier illustrate ‘a trip in the opposite direction, from visible to inaccessible, from public to salable’.

So there you have it. If you want to sell the Banksy equivalent of the Elgin Marbles, you are in for a tough time both from the artist and some critics. In England the man to go to if you want
to buy or sell a wall is Robin Barton. He ran the Bankrobber gallery in Notting Hill until the spring of 2011, when he closed it and went off to the Hamptons outside New York to curate a whole
exhibition devoted to Banksy walls. When I visited the Notting Hill gallery there was a calculated whiff of the outsider – the bank-robber – about the place, reflected by the first
painting that hit you as you walked in the door: a painting of Kate Moss costing £7000 called
Love
, completed by her former boyfriend Pete Doherty, whom Bankrobber represents, shortly
after their break-up. If I had had about £9000 to spare I could have bought another piece by Doherty called
Needle
. ‘Pete did this when he was going out with Kate Moss and he was
completely off his face. He came in here, grabbed a canvas, pulled some of his own blood – all in front of some appalled German students – and then started sketching with it. It’s
not high art but if you are at all turned on by that moment of time and excesses it will appeal to you.’ There were, too, some pieces by Ronald Kray, which were for inspection rather than for
sale: ‘They are not high art in any shape or form and I wouldn’t pretend they are, I collect them for fun.’ Amongst
all this the Hirst spot print, several
Banksys on the wall, a Warhol Campbell’s soup print on the floor beside Banksy’s Tesco tomato soup – ‘I hope to sell them as a pair to someone with money who wants to be
ironic’ – all seemed positively conservative.