Banksy (33 page)

As the price of a Banksy started escalating, people from his past – like Cookie with her graffitied-up furniture removal van and Mojo with his travelling circus, as well as Maeve and
Nathan with their articulated trailer – realised that they were sitting in, or on, serious money. Maeve and Nathan contacted a local art dealer and
Fungle Junk
was rescued from their
field, separated into three parts and bundled up into ‘museum quality’ Perspex boxes so it could take off on its last journey.

The first stop was the Number Nine Gallery in Birmingham, where the owner claimed it as a real coup for the city to get their hands on a Banksy. It might have been a coup but there was no buyer.
From there it travelled north to Hawick in Scotland, where Border Auctions, a family-run company that usually dealt in antiques, said they would have a go. Maurice Manning, a director, says,
‘We had a lot of interest and a lot of competition.’ Only two parts were put in the auction, one fetching £38,000 and the other £58,000; for a moment
Fungle Junk
looked tantalisingly close to being sold for almost £100,000. But the winning telephone bids both came with a condition: the pieces had to be authenticated. Manning says, ‘Pest Control
wouldn’t talk to us,’ and the sale never went through. Three months later they turned up at Lyon & Turnbull authenticated by Vermin and failed again.

At this point the pair had had enough. They were particularly incensed at how the impression seemed to have arisen that, says Maeve, ‘we had run off with artwork that wasn’t
ours.’ Banksy’s
right, she continues, ‘that art done for people on street walls shouldn’t be robbed and sold off, but these pieces like ours are just
not in the same category . . .’

Maeve says she is an anarchist, but there is also a distinct feeling that she is a bit of a toughie. She was not about to give up on
Fungle Junk
– ‘I’ve got four
children and not much money.’ Eventually she got through first to Pest Control and then to Banksy. It was, in her recollection, ‘a bit of a heated conversation’ over whether her
intentions were ‘capitalist’. ‘He wasn’t that unfriendly,’ she said. ‘He was just saying that he didn’t really like the fact that people were capitalising
on his paintings. Which is fair comment; it’s just that he’s capitalising on them too.’

‘You told him that?’, I asked.

‘Oh yeah I don’t hold back with my words.’

‘And he was OK with you telling him that?’

‘Yeah, he’s a human being. He took it. He understood where I was coming from. Because I said I am capitalising, I totally admit it. But why not? Why shouldn’t I? It’s our
painting to do what we like with. We didn’t rip it off a wall. We didn’t go and steal it from the street.’

Eventually an unusual deal was done.
Fragile Silence
received Pest Control authentication, although according to Maeve it was conditional on not talking to anyone about the deal. Were any
such condition to have been imposed, however, it is difficult to see how it might be effectively enforced: ‘Authenticated by Banksy, but later disowned’.

But
Fungle Junk
, which Banksy was apparently never too happy with, was different. The deal was that ‘Banksy’s people’ would come and collect it –which they did,
apart from that small section that still sits in the shower room and as far as Maeve knows it was
later destroyed. This was one early Banksy that was never going to come to
market. But they got more than just a certificate of authentication for
Fragile Silence
.

In February 2009 there was an auction at Selfridges, ‘the first in nearly 100 years of Selfridges’ history’. Some of the work was created by artists specifically to be
exhibited and then auctioned off for the Prince’s Trust; other pieces were included simply as part of the auction. Lot 69 was
No Ball Games
, a familiar Banksy image of two children
tossing a television between them as though it was the only form of play they were allowed. What made it unique was that it was spray painted on steel. It had all the right authentication and
‘it was acquired by the present owner directly from the artist.’ The ‘present owner’ was actually Nathan and Maeve, who had been given the painting by Banksy in return for
them giving him
Fungle Junk
. Even though it only reached £30,000, at the extreme low end of the estimate of £30,000 to £60,000, it was a result. They had got their way
through a combination of dogged persistence and the fact that it was their home that Banksy had painted rather than some random wall.

Other friends from Banksy’s past have had different experiences. Mojo’s huge truck, painted on all sides by Banksy at an outdoor millennium party in Spain, was available for viewing
off Oxford Street at the end of 2011. Mojo had managed to obtain Pest Control authentication and Dreweatts were offering the whole truck for sale ‘signed with artist stamp on both sides of
the chassis’ for around £400,000 (which included a year’s tax disc).

In Los Angeles, when the four partners who owned the water tank came to sell it, they very rapidly came up against Pest Control – a body which they had never heard of before. A very
disappointed Tavia D tells the story: ‘There were buyers who were
willing to throw money at us but they needed that piece of paper. And I was like, what is a piece of
paper? I was saying, “Do you consider this a piece of art? Then add it to your collection.”

‘This is where we started to learn more about the whole Banksy operation – like it’s almost a conspiracy, because it’s more of a business than it is about the art at the
end of the day. If it was about the art, then why is it that a collector that truly loves art wouldn’t look at this piece and say that’s a piece of art no matter what anybody else
says?’ She is ‘frustrated’ with collectors who have ‘lost their independence’, and she is disappointed with Banksy because ‘it’s probably all about the
business and not even about the art any more.’ It has to be said, though, that their capture of the elephant was just as much about business as it was about art. Tavia explained that the cost
of storing the tank in a warehouse meant that it would soon have to be scrapped and that would be ‘super-sad’. Indeed in December 2011 she told me that they had eventually been forced
to scrap the tank – the ‘magic of the elephant remains a lost mystery’.

Inevitably Stephan Keszler’s attempt to sell Banksy’s wall at the summer exhibition in the Hamptons saw Pest Control in attack mode once again. They issued a statement saying:
‘We have warned Mr Keszler of the serious implications of selling unauthenticated works but he seems not to care. We have no doubt that these works will come back to haunt Mr Keszler.’
Although both Keszler and Barton say they never received such an ‘admonishment’, the effect was the same: none of the pieces sold.

Yet however much Pest Control might complain, the point is that while these walls are ‘unauthenticated’ they are still Banksy’s work – no one has faked them. He is now in
a unique position. His straightforward prints and canvases are signed by
him and authenticated by Pest Control. But in addition there are the street pieces, which nowadays
are usually announced on his website and in the past were sometimes found in his book. Because he does not want these pieces to be removed, Pest Control will not authenticate them. So they are
Banksy works which are acknowledged in some way by him but not authenticated. Perhaps a new secondary market will eventually emerge dealing in authentic Banksys which nonetheless lack one key
piece of paper.

Pest Control has strong echoes of the Authentication Board set up by the Warhol Foundation eight years after his death, and which stamps in ink DENIED on the back of any canvas it does not
consider authentic, just to emphasise the point. By 2011, however, the Foundation decided it was spending too much money and time defending itself in the courts from lawsuits filed by those who
considered their Warhol authentic despite being DENIED. So it shocked the art world by announcing that the Authentication Board would be closed down in the spring of 2012. In future, it appears,
the market – helped by experts – will have to decide which is a genuine Warhol. Pest Control managed to establish almost the same level of control within eight months rather than eight
years and so far they have not had to deal with any lawsuits. It is a measure of how successful Pest Control has been that Robin Barton says it would be ‘the kiss of death’ if he tried
to apply for authentication. There are others who were wary of being interviewed because they feared that if, in the future, they were to apply for authentication of one of the pieces they owned
they would be rejected.

So Banksy had got rid of Steve Lazarides and sorted out his team. He had established his organisation as the only one whose
word dealers would accept on whether a Banksy
was real or not. The price of his pictures was not spiralling upwards in the same way it had in 2007 and 2008, but it was steady. What he needed now was a new challenge.

Fourteen

Bonjour Monsieur Brainwash

I
n May 2010, Lot 437,
Charlie Chaplin Pink
, went up for sale at Phillips de Pury in New York. It featured a sort of Charlie Chaplin figure
holding a can of pink paint, in front of a background of Marilyn Monroe faces with a couple of Campbell’s soup cans thrown in for good measure. It was described by Vandalog in his blog as
‘ugliness overload’, but despite this it reached double the estimate: $122,500. In October the same sort of painting was put up for auction in London – although this time it
featured Einstein, who was awkwardly holding a placard reading ‘LOVE IS THE ANSWER’ in front of a similar background. Not only was it signed by the artist but it was ‘marked by
the artist’s blood on the reverse’. This went for £75,000.

Both works were by Mr Brainwash, or MBW for short, and they were being sold at a time when some collectors seriously believed that Mr Brainwash might somehow be Banksy in disguise. Since then,
with the dawning of reality, these prices – apart from one auction result in France where a mixture of icons, Monroe, Mickey and Minnie Mouse and JFK fetched $82,107 – have not come
anywhere near being matched. Nevertheless such prices remain an amazing triumph of marketing. For Mr Brainwash is entirely a
Banksy construct. Street art without Banksy would
still exist, but Mr Brainwash without Banksy would never have arrived and never have survived.

The easiest way to grasp the identity of Mr Brainwash is to watch Banksy’s Oscar-nominated film
Exit Through the Gift Shop
, now available on DVD. A brief outline goes something like
this: Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman living in Los Angeles, picks up a camera and films graffiti artists – endlessly. He’s a friendly guy and a persistent one too, so he makes it up
through the ranks of the street artist hierarchy, filming them all until only Banksy is left. When Banksy arrives in Los Angeles to start the preliminary work on his show there, he needs a gofer.
Through Shepard Fairey he finds Guetta, who soon talks Banksy into allowing himself to be filmed and indeed, for a time at least, becomes a friend.

When, later, Guetta shows Banksy his ninety-minute street art film, Banksy realises it is unwatchable – ‘someone maybe with mental problems who happened to have a camera.’ So
he suggests that Thierry himself try his hand at street art – ‘Have a little show. Invite a few people, get some bottles of wine’ – and in turn Banksy will gain possession
of all the tapes and use them to make a film about street art. Guetta, now known as Mr Brainwash, turns his ‘little show’ into a mega-exhibition entitled Life is Beautiful and every
move he makes is filmed by Banksy’s crew.

With testimonials of a sort from Fairey and Banksy, free prints for the first 200 people into the exhibition and a cover story in
LA Weekly
, the queue for the show stretched along three
Hollywood blocks. The five-day opening was extended to two months, sales were astonishing and Guetta jumped from zero to hero. He had much more than his allotted fifteen minutes of fame and Banksy
had a movie. It is a very clever, funny movie about the making and
marketing of art, but it is also slightly depressing because Mr Brainwash – for a time at least
– is so successful in
brainwashing
fans into believing that his hype is actually art. Prankumentary, mockumentary, docu-parody are just some of the ways critics suggest it might best
be described; nevertheless it squeezes into the Documentary category for the Academy Awards, reaches the shortlist and narrowly misses an Oscar.

Banksy was undoubtedly the creative force that drove Mr Brainwash and thus the film forward; but the role he chose to play during his intermittent appearances in front of the camera was that of
the naïf artist who did not quite know what he had let himself in for. Slouched in a chair, fully hooded up and with his voice distorted, it is only his hands and particularly his fat fingers
that guarantee that it is Banksy we are looking at. He tells us that Thierry ‘was actually a lot more interesting than I am’ (unfortunately not); that ‘we all needed someone who
knew how to use a camera’ (he picked the wrong man); that ‘maybe I needed to trust somebody . . . I guess he became my friend’ (sort of).