Banksy (32 page)

The ‘grey areas’ usually come with what are known as the street pieces, whether they be Mystic Swing, walls, traffic bollards, gates or even the side of an articulated lorry. Banksy,
in the form of Pest Control, will not authenticate art he has done in the street, even though a piece like Mystic Swing is undoubtedly painted by Banksy. In part this is because to authenticate a
piece on the street is, as he says, ‘basically a signed confession on headed notepaper’. But in addition his argument is that he has created this art to be seen and indeed enjoyed in
context, and he is not going to give any help to anyone who wants to make money out of it or, indeed, simply wants to preserve it.

Banksy’s venture on to a Yorkshire farm in search of a location for his illustration for Blur’s
Observer Music Monthly
magazine cover shows just what a difference Pest Control
has made. In 2007 the farmer’s daughter sent to market part of the sheet metal gate on which Banksy had stencilled a girl happily hugging her TV set, done as a sort of trial run for the main
picture, where a different TV set is being thrown out of the window. When the shed was being renovated she managed to salvage half of the gate just before it was chucked into a skip. She kept it
under her bed for a year or
so until a friend who worked at an auctioneer’s suggested that there was money in her old gate.

In April 2007 the gate went into the same Bonhams auction as
Space Girl and Bird
, with an estimate of between £10,000 and £15,000. It was accompanied by a statement of fact
about Banksy’s farm visit for the
Observer
shoot and photographs of the gate still in situ, with the TV girl on it, but no other authentication. It sold for £38,400.

In July 2008 the farmer himself thought he would give it a try. He loaded on to a trailer not a gate, but the whole wall from his barn. This bore the stencil that had featured on the front of
the
Observer Music Monthly
, so there was no doubt at all that it was by Banksy and the estimate, £30,000 to £50,000, reflected this. But now Pest Control existed and the farmer
did not have his certificate – it seems very unlikely that he knew he needed one. Andrew Stewart, the dealer now trying to sell the wall, believes the van broke down or the trailer got a
puncture on the way to London, but either way it was a long, wasted trip: the wall did not sell.

Since then, says Mr Stewart, ‘We’ve had great fun trying to sell it. At one stage we were thinking of having a black tie do to introduce people to it on the farm.’ The asking
price has come down to between £20,000 and £25,000 – cheap for a Banksy wall – but there have still been no takers. ‘We know it is 100 per cent right but people are
quite strange about authentication letters,’ says Stewart. It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for the farmer. He did Banksy and the
Observer
a big favour at very short notice, his
wall is completely authentic, and if he had put it on the market six months earlier it would have sold. Banksy cannot claim he would be opening himself up to a possible prosecution if he admitted
that
he did the painting, since the farmer selling the wall was the man who gave him permission to spray it in the first place.

A couple of other ‘salvaged’ pieces also failed to sell at the same auction, one on a ceramic tile and the other on a piece of plywood; neither had the right authentication. But this
was just a skirmish. The deciding battle came a little later, at the end of September 2008. The Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull had made a very successful foray into the London art market
earlier in the year with a sale of British art from the 1960s held at the Royal Academy. Now they hoped to build on that with a second auction, this time in a deconsecrated church opposite
Regent’s Park. The auction was controversial enough anyway, selling off pieces from the recently closed Colony Room – the louche Soho drinking club made famous by the likes of Francis
Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard – that over the years artist members had given in lieu of their bar bills. But, just as controversially, among the twenty-four Banksys for sale were five street
pieces which had been authenticated, not by Pest Control but by a new organisation called Vermin. Four of the five pieces were rats. There was a photographer rat, painted on a traffic bollard and
submitted to the sale by Jon Swinstead, one of the original backers of Pictures on Walls. There was a gangsta rat from Liverpool on plywood and a drill rat on MDF from Brighton. There was a refuse
rat painted on a metal door that had been one of the pieces I had tried to find on my original Banksy tour – now I knew why I could not find it. The estimates for these rats were in the
£20,000 to £40,000 range. Finally there was a piece called
Fungle Junk
, a huge work in three parts which had originally been painted on the side of an articulated lorry. The
estimate for this was between £100,000 and £150,000.

All these pieces had been authenticated by Vermin, but would
that count? Vermin was set up by four dealers. Inevitably Robin Barton of Bankrobber was key amongst them.
James Allen, who more usually dealt in antiquarian books, was a second, and there were two others. They were, their anonymous spokesman said, an entirely independent body and what they could offer
would be their professional opinion based on their collective knowledge of Banksy’s early works.

While Banksy and many of his most committed fans thought that his works should be left to live or die on the streets, Vermin argued that they should be preserved and marketed like any other
important piece of art – recognised ‘for the iconic foundation stones they are’. For that to happen buyers needed to feel confident in what they were buying – one piece had
been rejected from the sale because Vermin were not convinced of its authenticity.

They stressed that they were ‘in no way connected to the artist’, which was certainly true. So the work would be classified as authentic without Banksy ever having to own up to it.
It all sounded mildly tongue in cheek, as though they were doing Banksy a favour. Unsurprisingly he did not see it that way, and nor did his fans.

‘He is a cult for a lot of people,’ says Barton. ‘When I did that sale the forums went absolutely berserk. The vitriol was unbelievable. It was almost as if I had murdered
someone. And it was all because I was going against their artist’s wishes. These are forum people. They have got a computer at home and they have bought a couple of prints and therefore
suddenly they are part of this bigger church. I quite like it in some ways, but it’s also a bit insane really.’

Banksy’s reaction was a good deal more subtle than that of his enraged fans. The day before the sale took place he issued a
statement which killed both Vermin and
any hope of selling any of the five pieces authenticated by Vermin. ‘Graffiti art has a hard enough life as it is – with council workers wanting to remove it and kids wanting to draw
moustaches on it, before you add hedge fund managers wanting to chop it out and hang it over the fireplace. For the sake of keeping all street art where it belongs I’d encourage people not to
buy anything by anybody unless it was created for sale in the first place.’

If that was not clear enough, Pest Control announced on its website: ‘All works authenticated by Pest Control have been done so in conjunction with the artist. Banksy does not provide this
service through any other third parties and we would caution collectors against relying on such bodies.’ Since its creation eight months earlier Pest Control had ‘identified 89 street
pieces and 137 screen prints falsely attributed to the artist . . . [he] would encourage anyone wanting to purchase one of his images to do so with extreme caution, but does point out that many
copies are superior in quality to the originals.’

‘If you read that story over someone’s shoulder on the tube you’d think that Lyon & Turnbull were selling fakes, but when you read the small print it said nothing of the
sort,’ says Barton. ‘There were never any fake Banksys being sold. They were just Banksys that Banksy no longer had control over. The fact that it wasn’t intended for resale by
Banksy is kind of irrelevant to me. If it’s not stolen, if proof of ownership is there, then I am prepared to try and market the pieces.’

Whatever Barton might think, the sale was a disaster. None of the four rats sold, nor did
Fungle Junk
. These were difficult times in the auction rooms anyway, but the malaise seemed to
spread like a disease from these five disputed lots to the whole auction.
Of the twenty-four works by Banksy in the sale only five managed to sell, and the overall selling
rate for all the lots was under 30 per cent. Lyon & Turnbull’s London ambitions were badly damaged and Vermin was destroyed – or, as a writer on one of the Banksy forums wrote with
obvious glee, ‘Bye, bye Vermin.’ Pest Control emerged triumphant. But there was one fight Banksy failed to win.

It was not a dealer who took on Team Banksy, but the two travellers who owned
Fungle Junk
. They had been friends with him from way back in his crusty days and saw no reason why he should
not help them now he had risen to such heights. They were not asking for charity, just authentication.

When they are not on the road Maeve Neale and Nathan Wellard, now both in their thirties, live in a field in Norfolk with their four children. Trying to find them is a bit like trying to find
Dave Panit, although the road to their field is much more potholed. A decorative skull and crossbones on the gate warns you to keep out – but oddly in a rather friendly, welcoming way. When I
arrived, there were children on a trampoline, dogs and horses, with lots of trailers and fairground equipment scattered about, as well as a random punch bag hanging from a tree, but there was no
door and thus no door bell. A shout through the hedge, however, brought a result. Maeve came out trailing children. They had all just come back exhausted from Glastonbury where they had been
supplying tents, and Nathan was already off preparing for a trip down to Cornwall for another festival the next morning.

It was a wonderful summer’s day and this woodland hidey hole, deep in the middle of nowhere, the base for their hard travellers’ life, seemed like some fairy-tale land entirely
separate from the world the rest of us inhabit. Winter, I suspect, would be very, very different. Rickety wooden steps went up to their home, an
articulated trailer, or two
articulated trailers married together. A lovely wooden dog carved by a chainsaw artist met me, but the trailer spoke of a tough existence. They had created one large room for everyone to live in,
along with a room for the parents, a bedroom that housed all four children, a shower and a loo on the way out. The children packed away the groceries and happily made tea for us while we sat in the
sunshine and Maeve told me their story and the fight they had had with Banksy.

Their articulated trailer started life as a refrigeration unit before it became their home. They used to hitch it up and go travelling to wherever they were delivering tents. But what they saw
as a home, Banksy saw as an inviting canvas; he contacted them through Seb Bambini, paid them their diesel money and in return got to paint one side of the trailer at Glastonbury in 1999. At this
point, anonymity was not a major issue. ‘It was performance art,’ said Maeve. ‘He did a show over three days in front of loads of people.’ It is a huge piece covering the
whole side of the lorry. There are a group of about six dodgy-looking men, vaguely military in appearance and supported by helicopters in the distance, carrying an inflatable dinghy up what is
presumably a beach. The dinghy is loaded not with guns, as you would expect, but with a sound system and someone who looks like a DJ sits in the back of it on the decks. On the other half of the
‘canvas’, separated by a small window, Inkie went to work with some intricate graffiti lettering spelling STEALTH – although, what with all the cider and sunshine, the L vanished
somewhere along the way.

Banksy finished it at the Sun and Moon Festival in Cornwall a few weeks later, doing some touching up, some outlining and adding the words which give some sort of meaning to this strange scene:
‘IT’S BETTER NOT TO RELY TOO MUCH ON SILENT
MAJORITIES . . . FOR SILENCE IS A FRAGILE THING . . . ONE LOUD NOISE AND ITS GONE.’ He gave the picture to the
two travellers, telling them they could paint over it if they didn’t like it. They never touched it and it remains on one side of the trailer, although plywood sheets now protect it from the
elements and from anyone who might fancy their very remote chances of stealing a huge Banksy.

The next year Banksy did a piece on the other side of their home, although this time it was the other way round, they paid him: ‘Only a couple of hundred quid, I think.’ This is
– or was, since it appears it no longer exists – the piece called
Fungle Junk
, which, in pictures at least, does not look nearly so interesting. Having started out with two
monkeys playing keyboard and drums, surrounded on both sides by banks of speakers, it was quite heavily altered by Banksy over time, with the monkey on keyboards re-emerging as a piglet and a
stencil of Sid Vicious appearing out of nowhere.

For several years this stayed on the other side of the trailer and it became something of an attraction. ‘I remember waking up in Brighton,’ Nathan told me later, ‘getting up
and going outside, only to find forty or so people taking photographs. You couldn’t park it in private anywhere any more.’

Banksy stayed friends with the couple. He wasn’t exactly a traveller, but for a time he was part of the whole movement. He even had his own small caravan, covered with graffiti of course,
and a van covered in zebra stripes. ‘He enjoyed a good party, a friendly bloke who would come to raves here and stay for a few days.’

But as the family expanded, so too did their home; the side of the trailer with
Fungle Junk
painted on it was removed and plonked fairly casually against the children’s Wendy house
so that
a second trailer could be joined up, doubling the size of their living space – it must have been very cramped indeed beforehand. The very end section of
Fungle Junk
did not need to be taken off, so you can still stick your head inside their shower room and see that one wall has a little bit of Banksy preserved on it.