Banksy (36 page)

As Banksy’s art had brought in a new audience, so too did his film. The approach was twofold: Banksy would get to work in each major city before the film arrived and at much the same time
the distributor would ‘screen the hell out of it’. These invitational screenings, designed to get the word out to a wider audience, were not for any Tom, Dick or Harry, they were
‘tastemaker’ screenings. ‘Musicians sat with film-makers, writers and graffiti vandals,’ said Marc Schiller, who helped with this campaign. ‘We announced the diversity
at the screenings.’ Once the film’s ‘offline presence’ had been established the promoters could then go online and to Twitter. And the audience they drew in were not regular
filmgoers. As Sloss said: ‘They don’t read the newspapers or traditional movie advertising – we were connecting with them online, from within their community.’

And it worked. Banksy told the
New York Times
that he financed the film himself, and the abbreviated 2010 accounts for his film company Paranoid Pictures show an investment of almost
£1.5 million, or roughly $2.4 million. Film finance is an obscure business, to put it mildly, but the headline figures are these. The American box office was almost $3.3 million, the foreign
box office was just over $2 million, making a total of $5.3 million; add to that DVD sales and television rights. By the time everyone else had taken their share Banksy might not have made a huge
profit, but he certainly would not have lost money.

Banksy complained in an email to one interviewer: ‘I have a great little team, but I tell you what – they all hate this fucking film. They don’t care if it’s effective,
they feel very strongly that Mr Brainwash is undeserving of all the attention. Most street artists
feel the same. This film has made me extremely unpopular in my
community.’ But the argument over whether Mr Brainwash deserved all the attention – and indeed whether he was ‘real’ – has rather overshadowed what an incredible
achievement by Banksy
Exit
was. To have had the idea for a film, spotted Thierry’s potential, turned him into a ‘street artist’ of sorts, financed the film, and pushed it
through to a very successful conclusion and to a possible Oscar is almost unbelievable, but in this case it really is ‘100 per cent true’.

Twelve years ago Banksy produced a video for the hip-hop artist Blak Twang, filmed largely at Queens Park Rangers’ football ground, and he declared afterwards that film was ‘the only
art form, apart from pop graffiti, that matters’. After
Exit
he had further pronouncements to make. ‘If Michelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making
Avatar
, not painting a chapel. Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it.’ He has
since made the
Antics Roadshow
(geddit?) for Channel 4, a quirky compilation of assorted acts of rebellion against society including a custard pie thrower, a streaker and the man who gave
Winston Churchill’s statue a Mohawk. His next full-length film might well be like a second novel: it will be difficult to live up to what has gone before, but he is almost bound to give it a
try.

As for Mr Brainwash, John Sloss says he is ‘sensitive’ to ‘some harsh stuff’ written about his talent – and it would be hard not to be. But if his goal was fame, he
has that; and if it was money he has that too. The ‘ultimate validation’ of Mr Brainwash’s show, according to the film’s narrator, ‘was measured in dollars and cents
– by the end of his opening week Thierry would sell nearly a
million dollars’ worth of art.’ Leaving aside the fact that Banksy quite clearly feels this is
no validation at all, it did mean money in the bank for Thierry.

And it did not stop there. Los Angeles was followed by New York and a record cover for Madonna. Being on the Brainwash email list I still receive regular notices of new prints about to be
released. There was one in the spring of 2011, for instance, of John Lennon’s face outlined in a sort of ‘join the dots’ manner and called, unsurprisingly,
Connecting
Lennon
. The bulk of the edition was priced at $250 a print, although there were five gold prints costing $600 each, and the whole edition would have made $40,000 if all the various colourways
sold. (On Mr Brainwash’s site a couple of months later,
Connecting Lennon
was marked as sold out.) At the end of the email was the usual impressive warning that comes with Brainwash
offers: ‘Please note: Due to overwhelming demand on certain print releases, Paypal cannot process the orders quick enough and may oversell. Any necessary refunds will be made within the
hour.’ Not bad for a failed cameraman.

Fifteen

Art Without a Theory

‘A
graffiti artist has taken this year’s Turner Prize,’ wrote
The Times
’s art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston as she
heralded the winner of the 2009 prize. So had Banksy, the man who had once painted ‘Mind the Crap’ on the steps of the Tate. actually won the Turner Prize? Well, no. Unsurprisingly this
was someone else entirely, someone who most street art fans had probably never heard of: Richard Wright, a painter memorably described as ‘a thinking person’s graffiti
artist’.

Wright had covered the whole of one of the Tate’s large walls with an intricate, absorbing pattern in gold leaf. It lacked the adrenalin, the speed, the lawlessness of traditional graffiti
but it was certainly a painstaking and intricate work. No cutting knife and stencil for him; instead he used both a single needle and a wheel with many needles attached to punch minute holes
through paper to create his pattern. Instead of a spray can he used chalk which went through these needle holes on to the wall, and on the faint outline the chalk had left once the paper had been
removed he glued the gold leaf. The work, said
The Times
, ‘pays homage to the cartooning techniques of the great Renaissance artists’. My
instant thought
on entering Wright’s gallery was that it reminded me of my mother’s heavy brocade curtains. It took some time to banish that thought and really start to enjoy it.

One of the visitors who left their comments on the noticeboard had a similar feeling: ‘Richard Wright’s work looks like the wallpaper in my nan’s house.’ But most
visitors loved it and particularly they loved the impermanence of it, the fact that it would be painted over once the Turner Prize exhibition finished. ‘His theory that nothing lasts for ever
is the truth.’ ‘Absolutely breathtaking. Knowing his work will never last makes you appreciate it all the more.’

The art critics were equally enthusiastic, drawn in particular to the ephemeral nature of his work. ‘He is a painter for our time and only for our time because he does not want his works
to last.’ ‘What defiant integrity, what a clever comment on the transience of riches.’ ‘Wright suggests that we question the power of capitalist markets, perhaps. His murals
cannot be owned. They will be painted over at the end of the exhibition. All that glitters is not sold in Wright’s glimmering world.’

But ten months later I was at the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park. The smell of big money wafted through the tented encampment and my trail soon led to the stand of Larry Gagosian,
contemporary art’s most important dealer with eleven galleries around the world. I had read that Gagosian represented Wright, which seemed rather confusing since it appeared from the Turner
Prize that there would be nothing permanent to sell.

The Gagosian stand was staffed by assistants so formidable you hardly dared look at them, let alone talk to them. Of course, when one did speak she was very nice and very helpful. She said she
had two Richard Wrights available, one very intricate piece priced at
$80,000 and a smaller one at $35,000. So not all his works are as ephemeral as his fans might
believe.

Here are two ‘graffiti artists’ who both produce work that is ephemeral, as well as studio work – in Wright’s case it is work on paper rather than canvas – designed
to be hung up and sold. So what does Wright have that Banksy doesn’t have? Why is it that Wright has eleven pieces in the Tate collection while Banksy has none? Banksy has featured only twice
in the Tate and one of those occasions was when he hung up his own picture there. (The second time was in 2007, when Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize with a detailed re-creation of the late
peace campaigner Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest, for which two paintings Banksy had given to Haw were meticulously copied – at the time of writing the originals were being held
in storage in east London by the police, who removed them when Haw’s space was reduced.)

Wright’s work is praised for being ‘wilfully elusive’, as one critic put it. Banksy on the other hand is seen as almost too obvious, too
easy
to understand. There is no
particular hidden meaning and none of the qualities – ‘violence, chaos and paranoid mania’ – that graffiti writers can sometimes offer. There are of course hidden references
in Banksy’s work. To take just one example, his portrait of Queen Victoria enjoying lesbian sex reflects the urban myth that she would not sign a bill outlawing homosexuality unless
lesbianism was removed from it, since she did not believe women did such things. And his work does still have some of the qualities – the anti-authoritarianism, the subversiveness – of
his past, although perhaps less so as the years roll on. But what you see is what you get, and in the world of contemporary art that is seldom enough.

Thirty-five years ago Tom Wolfe wrote the classic diatribe about modern art,
The Painted Word
, basing his onslaught on a
paragraph written by the
New York
Times
’s then chief art critic, Hilton Kramer: ‘Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our
intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial – the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the
values they signify.’ They were words, said Wolfe, ‘which gave the game away’. In short, ‘Without a theory to go with it, I can’t
see
a painting . . . Modern
Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.’

This, one suspects, is Banksy’s problem, although he certainly would not see it as a problem: there is no theory, persuasive or otherwise, behind his work. The viewer can connect instantly
with what they see. Five years ago, just before Banksy – or rather his prices – took off into the stratosphere, Marc Schiller, writing on www.woostercollective.com, put a compelling
case in his defence:

Shepard Fairey put it rather more concisely, calling him ‘the most important living artist in the world’.

‘Accessible’ was the adjective I heard most often when listening to people talk about Banksy, with sometimes – but certainly not always – the
slight undertone that ‘accessible’ art is art that is all too easy. It was an attitude probably best and most harshly expressed by the
Guardian
art critic Jonathan Jones, who was
on the jury that chose Wright as the Turner Prize winner. Banksy, he wrote,

But, being so much part of the art world, perhaps Jones underestimates how exclusionary this world can feel. In his recent book,
How Pleasure Works
, the Yale academic Paul Bloom argues
that ‘Traditional art is about what is in the world; more modern works are about the very process of representation. An appreciation of much of modern art therefore requires specific
expertise. Any dope can marvel at a Rembrandt, but only an elite few can make any sense of a work such as Sherrie Levine’s
Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp)
, and so only an elite few are
going to enjoy it.’

Banksy would almost certainly be happy with the idea that ‘any dope’ can enjoy his work along with that of Rembrandt. Indeed in an (emailed) interview with the
New Yorker
he dared to mount an attack on the obscurity which seems to be an essential part of contemporary art. ‘I don’t think art is much of a spectator sport these days. I
don’t know how the art world gets away with it, it’s not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the DJ says, “If you read the thesis that comes
with this, it would make more sense.”’