Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  When Baron Winterstoke gave the museum to the people of Bristol he hoped it would provide them with both ‘instruction and enjoyment’. Among the comments left by visitors was one from Vera Flemina: ‘Last week I came to see the Banksy Exhibition. I am 87 years old: I can’t recall when I last had such a wonderful experience. I was happy, my ancient batteries re-charged (hopeful) . . . Perhaps I will go to Glastonbury next year.’ How much instruction they gained from Banksy is arguable, but there is no doubt that more than 300,000 visitors got all the enjoyment the Baron could have possibly hoped for.

  Nine

  Welcome to Team Banksy

  In February 2007 the Knightsbridge dealer Acoris Andipa was skiing with his family on the Hornberg in Gstaad when he was interrupted by a furious call from someone doing PR for Banksy. ‘This was my first introduction to the Banksy camp, they have a very unique way of doing things,’ he says now with considerable understatement.

  ‘There I was literally on top of the mountain and the conversation basically began by her demanding, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” I said, “Excuse me, who are you? What kind of way is this to start a conversation?” ’ The PR said they were representing Banksy – ‘and he was very upset, and I replied that was the furthest intention from what we want.’ The conversation improved slightly from there, but it is easy enough to see why the PR was so upset, for at that moment Andipa must have represented Banksy’s worst nightmare. His credentials as a street artist are both genuine and important to him, but here was Andipa about to put on a Banksy exhibition in his gallery in Knightsbridge and – possibly even worse – already showing Banksys at the Palace hotel in Gstaad, so very far from ‘the street’ that the penthouse suite will set you back €9000 or so a night.

  Although Andipa had admired Banksy’s work for almost two years, previously he was never quite sure how it would sell if he tried taking it from ‘underground to overground’. So he had decided to test it out. Before Christmas 2006 he put on a show entitled Hirst and his Contemporaries, and he included about eight Banksys to gauge the reaction of the Knightsbridge crowd. ‘The Banksys just went,’ he said, ‘we sold them all on the opening night. I thought, my goodness. Wow. These were my collectors, my clients, who were here by invitation only. People who buy Picassos only from me. Who buy Damien Hirsts only from me . . .’

  Vandal . . . outlaw . . . graffiti . . . Shoreditch . . . never mind, affluent Knightsbridge was gagging for him. Andipa had taken over the gallery from his mother, who used to specialise in icons. But as the market for icons disappeared he had, with some considerable family pain, moved to contemporary art. Now he was going to jump to street art. In the next couple of months Andipa moved fast, spending a lot of money rounding up enough Banksys to make a worthwhile show. Just before his own exhibition opened he took several of the pieces on his annual trip to Gstaad and the winter exhibition at the Palace. ‘What surprised me was that almost every single person who came in to see the show knew about Banksy. These were high rollers and they had learned predominantly from his book Wall and Piece, which they’d been given as a gift or a stocking-filler.’ It was during this exhibition that Andipa had received the phone call up on the mountain, which was followed up back in England by a conversation with Steve Lazarides, still Banksy’s agent at the time, who thought the show was ‘piracy’. Their key worry was that this whole exhibition would make it look as though Banksy had sold out to the Knightsbridge set. For the Andipa Gallery is on Walton Street, a street oozing boutique luxury, a street where Viscount Linley’s wife Serena chose to open her shop selling fragrances, candles and bespoke soaps from Provence; a street where you can buy handmade Oriental rugs, porcelain, designer maternity wear, nursery furniture, monogrammed linen and the like – in short, everything that Banksy was not.

  Banksy himself emailed Waldemar Januszczak: ‘If I was conspiracy-minded, I’d say this was a plot to destroy my last shred of credibility. But then I do a good enough job of that myself.’ Even though the exhibition was completely out of context, it was a rare chance to see a lot of Banksys in one place and over the next month about 35,000 people managed to squeeze their way into this small gallery.

  ‘We had to bring in crowd control to manage everything on Saturdays because the queue would be all the way down Walton Street,’ says Andipa. ‘They were all very polite, predominantly young hoodies, very sweet and very respectful. These were the hardcore street fans who normally wouldn’t dream of coming to Knightsbridge, let alone coming to an art gallery in Knightsbridge.’ And however much Andipa put notices in his catalogue and on the wall of the gallery explaining he was not representing Banksy, the whole thing was too close to Harrods for a notice or two to be any comfort to the Banksy camp.

  The exhibition was an outstanding success. Andipa was asking £70,000 for a canvas of Flower Thrower with Stars, produced in an edition of twenty-five; another canvas, Kids on Guns, also in an edition of twenty-five, and which depicts two children standing on a mountain of weapons clasping their balloon and their teddy, was priced at £45,000. (Another financial delight of his chosen technique is that Banksy can, if he wishes, produce more than one canvas from the same stencil.) Andipa had gambled heavily on Banksy and he was richly rewarded. Practically everything sold, and the gallery could expand into the basement to create a very smart second floor. He has put on further Banksy exhibitions in Knightsbridge and his annual Banksy show in Gstaad continues profitably. In some way he seems to enjoy the mischief he has undoubtedly been making, telling the Associated Press after one Gstaad exhibition: ‘Every single person – including clients who’d come in their Lear jets – walked in and said, “Wow, Banksy – and it’s only £150,000.”’ Andipa is one of the very few people who has operated successfully outside Banksy’s control.

  For, whatever the outward impression, the fact is that Team Banksy – and it is a very small team – is just as determined as any other celebrity’s team to keep control of events. Take the UK launch, in March 2010, of Exit Through the Gift Shop. The task for any magazine editor when a film is opening is to bag the star for an interview and picture shoot and to bag him or her exclusively. No one else is allowed to have the star on their cover, no one else can brag that they have the exclusive interview. The negotiations with the PRs – ‘fuck pigs’ one frustrated magazine editor used to call them, but never to their face – can be endless: photo approval, interviewer approval, copy approval, all these are up for grabs even though the star seldom gets everything that they want.

  For his film Banksy got it accepted that the interview – as usual – could only be by email and that his artwork would be on the cover. What was much more of a PR triumph was that there were not one but two ‘exclusive’ interviews. The Sunday Times claimed an ‘exclusive interview’ and an ‘exclusive cover’ by Britain’s ‘most reclusive artist’. Well, neither totally ‘reclusive’ nor ‘exclusive’, for Time Out went one step further, claiming a ‘world exclusive’ plus ‘his only interview’. For a PR paid to publicise a film it was as if all her dreams had come true.

  Jo Brooks, who started her own PR company and continues to run it from Brighton, is one of the key members of the team. She is described by a friend as ‘brilliant, entertaining and sharp as a needle’. Her small, slightly chaotic office suits Banksy’s style. Her first major job for Banksy was organising the press, or rather lack of press, for Turf War in 2003 and she has been with him ever since. He is not her only client but he is certainly her most important. Yet she has a much more difficult task than might be imagined. She has to preserve his anonymity while nourishing his fame; preserve his street credibility while his pictures earn him more and more money; give a Banksy exhibition the sense that it is somehow secret – an insider thing – while letting people know it’s happening. She not only orchestrated all the PR for his exhibition in Bristol, somehow managing to convey the friendly impression that it was a heist – that he had virtually stolen the space from the Bristol City Museum – but eve
n provided the museum with the link to the Los Angeles gallery which put on the summer exhibition the next year. And she has done all this very quietly and successfully without creating enemies for her client or for herself.

  But if she is a key member of Team Banksy, she is not the most important member; that title undoubtedly goes – or rather went – to Steve Lazarides, a fellow member of the Bristol clan who was his agent, his manager, his salesman for the six most financially profitable years of Banksy’s life and had a rather more informal arrangement with him for about four years longer than that. Without Banksy, Lazarides – Laz to some – would not be a key purveyor of urban art, or outsider art as he prefers to call it, in London today; but it is also safe to say that without Lazarides Banksy would simply not have the recognition, the influence and the money that he has today.

  A colleague who says he does not want to be identified remembers: ‘Steve was Banksy’s manager to all intents and purposes and any sort of enquiry would go through Steve. They were very close, they were really good mates, really good friends. In fact they were a bit of a double act when they were together. They were like naughty schoolboys who suddenly got lucky. Steve was an intelligent, nice, relaxed guy who really loved what he was doing. At one point I think that Banksy was even giving him his cash to put in the bank because he didn’t have an account himself. He was making lots of decisions and taking the pressure off Banksy and he was very protective of him. He knew there was a risk that Banksy would get exploited and he really didn’t want that to happen.’

  They are not speaking to each other now. The break-up happened over several months; things started to go badly wrong at the end of 2007 and it was all over by December 2008, when Lazarides sold his shares in Banksy’s Pictures on Walls back to the company. It was a big moment in both men’s lives. Lazarides had lost his best client; Banksy had lost the man who made it all possible. But, like most things to do with Banksy, no one wants to talk about the break-up and when they do talk they leave far more unsaid than said. At one point Lazarides commented: ‘There was no acrimony there. We’d been working together for years and it seemed the right thing to do. He has gone off to do his own thing and here I am running my gallery.’

  He did however expand slightly in an interview with Susan Michals for Vanity Fair Daily when she asked what happened: ‘We spent about 10 years together, and I wanted to branch out. You have to grow up. Otherwise you just look like a fool. We haven’t really spoken to each other in a long time; to be honest, I have no idea where he is. And it gave me much more capacity to work with everyone else. It was an amazing ride and I wouldn’t be here without it, but I don’t necessarily miss it.’

  She suggested to him it was like a relationship when people don’t define you as an individual but as a couple: ‘It annoys him far more than it annoys me,’ he said with a laugh. ‘A decade is a long time, especially when you’re both as driven as we are.’

  As for Banksy, almost the only thing he has said on the subject is, ‘The best I can say right now is, “No comment”.’ But that is not quite the only thing he has said, for on his website at one point he placed a notice saying: ‘Please Note: Banksy has never produced greeting cards, mugs or photo canvases of his work. He is not represented by any of the commercial galleries that sell his work second hand (including Lazarides Ltd, Andipa Gallery, Bank Robber, Dreweatts etc . . .).’ Placing Lazarides in the same company as galleries that Banksy’s team has always tried to fight off, Andipa and Bankrobber, was an insult, a bitchy thing to do.

  It somehow doesn’t fit the outlaw image, but the sad fact is that the circle around Banksy is just as full of fun but also of paranoia, unease, jealousy as any other workplace. For example, it is even suggested that Lazarides was allowed a brief appearance in Exit Through the Gift Shop just so they could put a caption underneath him reading: ‘Banksy’s former spokesman.’ At the time of the split employees of both Banksy’s and Lazarides’ galleries were advised they were to break off contact with each other, but given the friendships that already existed at least this separation of staff did not last long.

  There are all kinds of explanations floating around to explain the split. One story went that Banksy had paid a visit to the Lazarides household; he had seen the luxury, the comfort, above all the flock wallpaper, and had exploded. The result was a painting, first seen in February 2009, in which a young hoodie is spraying a flock pattern on a wall. The work is called, none too subtly, Go Flock Yourself – just to make the point. It is a good story but there is just one problem with it: it is completely untrue. For one thing, there is no flock wallpaper in Lazarides’ house, and for another it is very unlikely that Banksy ever went round there to check out the wallpaper for himself.

  However, another source had a different explanation: ‘They certainly fell out spectacularly. It was over a magazine piece which was an interview that basically had Steve sitting on a throne in his office saying “I made Banksy”. It was more complex than that but Banksy being a control freak didn’t like that at all. So the king builder got dethroned. It was purely a clash of egos really.’ This source has it right: the relationship had been growing very strained anyway but it was the magazine piece that blew the whole thing apart, although the article was not nearly as provocative as he remembers it to be.

  In November 2007 Charlotte Eagar interviewed Lazarides for the Evening Standard’s ES magazine. Hunting for this piece I thought that it would be all about Lazarides the king-maker boasting about how he had made Banksy what he is today. But actually, when I found the right article, Banksy’s reaction to it told me more about Banksy than it did about Lazarides. For while Lazarides was certainly happy to talk away about himself and his plans, there was not much in the way of strutting – nowhere did he claim to be the man who made Banksy and he certainly denied the suggestion floating around that he actually was Banksy. The line on the cover called him ‘The man who sells graffiti to Hollywood’, which is true, and inside he was called ‘the man who turns graffiti into gold’ and ‘a marketing genius’, which also happens to be true. There was no picture of him sitting on a throne, he was just leaning casually against a wall. The problem, it appears, was that it was simply a profile of an artist’s manager and the artist hardly got a look in. Amazingly, from that day on it was over and the only question was how they were going to separate out their lives.

  One source in Los Angeles suggests that the problem was that Lazarides ‘just got too big. He had about ten or fifteen artists he was representing and he didn’t have the time or even the will to devote all his energy towards Banksy. Banksy was feeling a little bit short changed and he just needed a lot of attention because he had grown up so big and fast.’ But perhaps the best way the split can be explained is in biblical terms. Lazarides had taken Banksy up to the mountain top, he’d tempted him with the likes of Angelina Jolie, fame, money, success. And instead of Banksy telling him ‘Get thee hence,’ he had, for a time at least, lapped it all up. It was this deal with the devil that appears to have ‘weirded out’ Banksy and in the long run ended their relationship.

  Lazarides is a very good salesman – there is something of the great American showman P.T. Barnum about him. According to the profile that ended his relationship with Banksy there was ‘nothing of the sharp suit about him’, but that was a few years back – nowadays he can be just as sharp-suited as any other dealer, perhaps more so. He is shaven headed but somehow his friendly smile overcomes any hint of the football yobbo and he is fast talking, entertaining, fun – you feel he could sell you anything. Banksy is an artist who has no interest in being a celebrity and the fact that he has no interest has made him into a celebrity. It was thus a very intense marriage with considerable benefits for both of them. One of the outer circle says, ‘Lazarides was representing a superstar who wanted to remain anonymous. And thus he became a superstar by proxy, he was very much seduced by fame.’

  Being a showman Lazarides embroiders history a little, although probably rather less
than Banksy does. His father was born in Famagusta in Cyprus, known best by Brits for its cheap package holidays – at least until 1974 when the Turkish army invaded, capturing the town from the Greeks and turning it into a ghost town. His father came to Britain and settled in Bristol where he ran a kebab shop. He married an Englishwoman – although they eventually split up – and Steve, born in 1969, was one of eight children across different marriages. Among his siblings he numbers a plumber/builder, a truck driver, an electrician, a landscape gardener, a school secretary and a pet-life insurance saleswoman. While Lazarides has driven himself way beyond his background, he is still connected – when he opened his Euro Trash show in Los Angeles, for instance, he flew his father out to join him.

  By his own account Lazarides started life as a painter and decorator and occasional chicken plucker and concrete mixer, but these jobs were never going to turn into anything permanent. He tried his hand at graffiti, realised he was no good at it and at about the age of fourteen turned to photography instead. He managed to get a place on a foundation course at Filton Technical College (now Filton College) in Bristol where he happened across Inkie, the graffiti artist who was later to introduce Banksy into the city’s graffiti scene. Inkie says now: ‘Where I lent Banksy his “credibility” in the UK graffiti scene, Steve in turn marketed his work to make him the global phenomenon he is now.’

  From there he went to Newcastle Poly to study photography while DJing in clubs at the weekend. After a couple of very short-lived jobs, first as a studio runner and then assistant to the photographer David Bailey, he finally found a permanent job painting sets for a film studio. Wilde and Sliding Doors are two of the sets he remembers and some of the people he saw on the set from afar are now his clients. From there his long-time partner Susana introduced him to a friend at Sleazenation, which together with its sister magazine Jockey Slut was aimed – unsurprisingly, with a name like that – at the youth ‘subculture’ slice of the market. ‘They needed a picture editor, so they just gave me the job as I walked in the door,’ he says. In 1997, while he was at Sleazenation, he went off to photograph Banksy, or rather the back of his head. Starting over a cup of coffee – as Mills and Boon might have it – the two outsiders, making their own way in the world, became friends. Banksy was soon tipping Steve off about where to find his latest stencils so he could photograph them before they were wiped out. In Banksy’s first book Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall, published in 2001, all the photographs – and there were a lot of them – were credited to Lazarides. At this time Banksy already had an agent from his Bristol days, Steve Earl, but it was an arrangement without a contract and it ended when Lazarides came along and showed he could do the job better.