Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  Steve Earl’s story is a sad one. He was brought up in Wakefield where his father was a bricklayer. His parents supported him while he was at college training to be a butcher. At nineteen he had gained all the qualifications he needed, but decided he was going to abandon the butcher’s trade for the music industry. At that point he had what his brother Julian describes as ‘a fall-out with my father. My dad said, “Well, if you’re going to be a musician you’re going to have to go fend for yourself.”’ He left home as Stephen Earl Young and ended up in Bristol as Stephen Earl, his surname abandoned. He kept in touch for a few years but the family never saw him again. Many years later his brother, with considerable help from the police, managed to track him down to a flat in Barcelona. But although he wrote to him, Steve never replied and he died alone and pretty much penniless in 2007 aged forty-three. In between Wakefield and Barcelona he had an up and down career in Bristol, London and New York as DJ, DJ’s agent and Banksy’s agent.

  Julian talked to Steve’s friends after his brother’s death to try to piece together his history. ‘He seemed to see a talent in people and get them to a certain stage and then someone else would come along and take them off him.’ That was certainly true of Banksy, whom he represented when he first came to London but whom he fell out with in 2003. ‘I don’t think he had a contract or anything like that,’ says his brother. ‘He told a friend “That’s it, I’m over with Banksy, it’s all done with.” But he just carried on with his life, he didn’t seem to get too wound up about it.’

  Martin Worster, a former music journalist, met Steve at an internet café in Barcelona where they both worked. ‘He told me he had been Banksy’s manager but he wasn’t any more. It seemed that there had been some dispute over money. I think it was possibly over Blur but I am not sure.’ As well as being entertaining and good company he was also ‘an elusive guy, quite hard to pin down . . . when I first met him he reminded me a bit of an eighties pop star who had fallen on hard times.’

  Both in London and Barcelona Steve was never short of a Banksy or two. A DJ who used to visit his office in Notting Hill said it was completely full of Banksy prints and canvases. In Barcelona too he decorated his flat with an impressive array of Banksys, including one massive painting, ‘an amazing piece’ depicting grannies outside a burning supermarket. But he was having money troubles and he traded two Banksy stencils on board for a business debt he owed Martin – since the debt was about £500 it would have proved a bad deal for Steve in the long run, but this was in the days before Banksy had become a big name. Two years later Martin left Barcelona and lost touch until he was told of Steve’s death. Steve Earl had gone out to make his own way and lived a life that had been heartbreakingly close to being a huge success, but in the end he had had to rely on a dwindling supply of Banksys to keep afloat.

  Lazarides tells of his first business venture together with Banksy in various different ways, but the essentials are that Banksy needed a lift to Bristol where he was going to sell his prints for either £5 or £10 apiece, depending on which version of the story is more accurate (whatever the price, it was mouth-wateringly cheap). ‘I said, “I’ll buy them all and sell them on.” I had friends who had a few quid who quite liked his stuff, so I wound up selling more than the person that was looking after him [Steve Earl]. And it just spiralled from there.’

  So Lazarides was not quite there from day one, and he and Banksy never quite had the same symbiotic relationship as, say, Jay Jopling and Damien Hirst. But he was in the picture from early on, and Acoris Andipa says, ‘It was Lazarides building it from nothing. He is the one to be credited for all the hard work he did.’ Lazarides himself says, ‘I think it was very much a two-way street in the sense that we helped each other in those early days. It’s probable that without Banksy I may not have got to where I am today.’ Note the use of the word ‘probable’ rather than ‘certain’ or ‘true’ – understandably he is not going to give Banksy all the credit.

  He says that his route to the gallery world ‘started from selling work out of the boot of my car in a pub car park’. It is so difficult to imagine now that only a few short years ago it was a real struggle to offload Banksy prints. From the car boot sale he advanced to making the rounds of London dealers. One of them remembers: ‘Stephen Lazarides would come round with rolls of these prints under his arm and try to flog them off to us at, you know, £50 a pop. And we did buy them and we used to get discounts from him before anyone had even heard of Banksy prints.’ From there things progressed so that Lazarides was wholesaling prints to places like Selfridges (yes, Selfridges!), the Tom Tom Gallery in London, the Green Leaf bookshop in Bristol, and Tate Modern – Banksy was not hanging on the walls but you could buy a print there. Sales soon reached a point where Lazarides no longer needed the smaller outlets. It was a fairly brutal moment. The same dealer remembers it well: ‘The thing that irked us a bit was one minute we were always first to be phoned, first to be contacted about new releases, and then suddenly the gate came down. No discounts and not even no discounts, they didn’t want to sell to us as dealers at all. It was a kind of mean-spirited thing more than anything else. It was just like “You’ve been useful to us and now bugger off.”’

  In 2002 Banksy released his first properly organised, editioned print run, Rude Copper – a stencil of a policeman giving the finger – in an edition of 250, fifty of which were signed. Originally the edition was only going to be 100 prints but at the last minute they raised it to 250 to see what happened. In those early days, says a fan who witnessed it all, everything was somewhat disorganised. ‘There were 250 copies and loads of extras. Number One might be unsigned, although it would be stamped, and then someone might want the second one signed, so two or three would get signed and then there would be more unsigned. There was chaos, really, about which was part of the edition and which wasn’t. And there wasn’t any consistency.’ These prints went for around £40; today they can be picked up at auction for about £8000, or around £13,000 for the few that have a hand-sprayed graffiti background. In the next year fourteen additional prints were released in editions that ran from 500 to 750. Ironically, given the fact that today a signed print always fetches a considerably higher price than an unsigned one, it was the signed prints, costing just that little bit extra, which were the hardest to sell – ‘They used to be hanging around for ages,’ says one of the team who was trying to sell them.

  So, suddenly, roughly 7000 Banksy prints or more were being released on to the market and life had to get a bit more serious. Early in 2004 Pictures on Walls was formally incorporated, the first of Banksy’s companies. The finance was put up by Jon Swinstead, who published Sleazenation and Jockey Slut, and POW’s first base was at PYMCA, a youth culture picture agency established by Lazarides and Swinstead on the floor above the Sleazenation office.

  By the end of 2004, Swinstead says, he had ‘walked away’ from POW, but he did not want to go into any further detail. Steve Parkin, who used to employ Lazarides as a DJ in his Newcastle days, replaced him and put up the second tranche of finance which kept the company afloat. The majority shareholder was – and remains – Jamie Hewlett, the creator of Tank Girl and co-creator of Gorillaz, while Lazarides had eighteen shares. Nowhere in the records is there ever a mention of Banksy – perfectly legally, without shares and without a directorship, he is relying on his friendship with Hewlett for his involvement with the company.

  White cube galleries might be the holy grail for ambitious young artists, but as the demand for the prints they were releasing grew, both Lazarides and Banksy realised they had stumbled upon a new eager audience for art among people who had never set foot in a traditional gallery and had no desire to do so. Both of them enjoyed slagging off these galleries, although Lazarides is the more loud-mouthed about them and the ‘chippy bastards working behind the desk’. There’s nothing he hates more than a white cube gallery: ‘I do black walls, I do red walls, vintage wallpaper, anything other than fucking white. I have a path
ological hatred of white walls.’ Banksy himself has always tended to be more rude about the art inside the galleries than the galleries themselves: ‘Anti-graffiti groups like to say tagging intimidates people, but not as much as modern art. That stuff is deliberately designed to make normal people feel stupid.’

  Their way of selling art sounds simple now but at the time it was revolutionary. People could see for themselves a piece of Banksy’s work on the street, and if they lived too far away or it had already been washed off by the anti-vandal patrols there were always good photographs of it on the internet – it would become something of a contest to see who could get their picture up on the web first. Some of these street pieces would eventually become limited edition prints which could be bought on the web without their purchaser ever having to venture into a gallery – accidentally the piece on the street had become an advertisement for itself. These online customers buying prints give Banksy a wider and more active web base than probably any other artist, living or dead.

  For those who could afford a Banksy original and wanted to see the canvas on a wall in an exhibition, then Lazarides the showman was on hand, for as Jude Law once said, ‘Steve is a bit of an event himself.’ Turf War in 2003, followed by Crude Oils in 2005 and then Barely Legal in Los Angeles in 2006 and Bristol (without Lazarides) in 2009, were all very different shows but they had key elements in common: they were free; they were never publicised in the usual way, the secrecy adding to the allure; there were no white walls; and they were fun – the only thing that was intimidating was the queue to get in.

  And for those who wanted a gallery to come to, rather than having to brave rats and pigs and elephants and crowds at the Banksy events, Lazarides opened his own gallery in Soho in early 2006 (he now has two more: one, much bigger, in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia and a second in Newcastle run by Steve Parkin, who left Banksy at the same time Lazarides did). True, there are no white walls, but there is no getting away from the fact that the two London galleries are pretty straightforward, however hard Lazarides attempts to add a little edginess to emphasise that he is still one step removed from the system. He talks about his gallery in Soho having previously been a former sex shop for spanking enthusiasts which came complete with a dungeon, while he says his Fitzrovia gallery, in a five-floor townhouse, used to be a former brothel. In the same way, when he gave a show in New York he was almost proud of the fact that the former kitchen warehouse where he opened the exhibition used to ‘have a lot of rat shit all over the floors’. However, his gallery in Rathbone Place now comes with a studio on the top floor occupied not by an artist but by one Johnnie Sapong – according to Esquire ‘a star in the hairdressing firmament’ – who counts among his customers Bryan Ferry, Jude Law, Orlando Bloom and Justin Timberlake and charges £420 for a consultation. Edge is everything.

  And in addition to the web, the shows or Lazarides’ galleries, there were always the London auction houses. While Banksy himself never sold to the big auction houses – that would be a step too far for his followers – he did sell to Lazarides (£837,000 worth of paintings recorded in the company accounts in the years 2007 and 2008). What Lazarides did with them is unclear but the belief in the art world is that some of those paintings ended up with the auction houses.

  What Banksy and Lazarides had done together was to create a market for street art where none had existed before. And it paid handsomely: ‘We had a spectacular year in 2007 when we took three times the amount of money we took in any other year, but the market took a battering after that,’ says Lazarides. And while it will do nothing to change the mind of artists who accuse him of being a sell-out, the fact is that without Banksy there might be a street art movement but there would not be a street art market.

  When Lazarides left Banksy in late 2008 he sold his eighteen shares back to Pictures on Walls for a total of £70,000. (Parkin sold his shares back for £40,000.) It was good money, but he had lost much more than that – the artist who was capable of making more money for him than any other he will ever represent. There was no doubt Banksy would survive without Lazarides, but how would Lazarides survive without Banksy? The answer is, surprisingly well up to now. ‘Everything I’ve done so far, all the expansion, has really happened in the recession. We only really started to find some sort of momentum in 2007 just before the rug was pulled . . . I’m immensely proud of the fact that the business is still going in 2011 when all we’ve done is reinvest every single penny we’ve made into expanding the business.’

  Century published his book Outsiders, claiming to cover both artists who work on the streets and those who have ‘made their name without taking the traditional path’. Despite the book’s all-encompassing if slightly ludicrous subtitle, ‘Art By People’, there is no Banksy in the book, and Lazarides suggested that Banksy ‘is a once-in-a-generation artist, if we had put even one image of his in the book it would have become all about him.’ He might well be right, but the book was published almost a year after their breakup, so there is almost certainly more to Banksy’s exclusion than simple artistic judgement. In addition Lazarides has published about fifteen books himself, either on the various artists he represents or on some of his shows. Hell’s Half Acre, for instance, was the record of an extraordinary show he put on in conjunction with the Old Vic in October 2010 in the gloomy underground tunnels next to Leake Street. This was just about as far away from white walls as you could imagine, turning Dante’s Inferno into a darkly lit exhibition-experience with everything from an armada of forty beautiful model ships suspended from the ceiling to wriggling maggots, a globe pierced with hypodermic syringes, Bernie Madoff (the fraudster now serving a 150-year prison sentence) carved out of plaster and an incredibly irritating loud dog bark that met you at the door to hell and would not go away.

  He continues to attack the American market with flamboyance, organising huge shows in New York and Los Angeles. So he is still successful without Banksy, but it is a harder and perhaps riskier job than before. The art he sells remains very different and often exciting; nevertheless it all seems quite far removed from the street. A fellow gallery owner suggests: ‘The initial thing was the whole Santa’s Ghetto model – find a really destroyed space and put some artwork up. Now I think it’s more about finding a space that looks money and then it’s easier to get people with £40,000 to spend on artwork in there. So it’s kind of going along with the established ways of selling artwork.’

  But if Lazarides has shown what a classy gallery owner he is even without Banksy, what of Banksy without Lazarides? There is now no public face of Team Banksy as there was in Lazarides’ day. But behind the scenes Holly Cushing, who changed horses from Lazarides with a couple of other staff, is now the power in Banksyland. One insider says she is so powerful ‘she is Banksy.’ Back in 1995, when she was working in California, she was listed as a ‘production office assistant’ for Sean Penn’s film The Crossing Guard. So when Lazarides was preparing for Banksy’s Barely Legal in Los Angeles, he asked Cushing to round up Brangelina and other celebrities to come to the show. She did the job incredibly well. Joel Unangst, who watched her at work, says: ‘Out of all the people involved in the whole thing she came out on top and it’s not surprising to me at all. She’s a lovely woman and very attractive, but hard as nails at the same time. She knows about power and money and celebrity and she knows how to run with that crowd – she just thrives in that world. But she takes no prisoners.’ Back in England she worked for the Lazarides gallery until the break-up, helping in particular with special sales. She keeps a low profile, never giving interviews, and is no competition to Banksy in the way Lazarides was perceived to be, but she is now the nearest anyone gets to being his manager. One measure of her success is the way she has risen to the top of the film credits. No longer is she Sean Penn’s ‘production office assistant’; instead, for Exit Through the Gift Shop she is Banksy’s ‘Executive Producer’.

  I confess I have never met Holly, but I have heard quite a bit about her. Opinions
range from Acoris Andipa’s – ‘She seems to be a very professional, balanced individual’ – to that of a gallery owner who says ‘she wants to control everything’. Another source suggests ‘she is the direct line to the big man.’ All in all, it sounds as though she is doing the job required of her.

  People might not hear much of Holly but she is a sight to see. One influential member of the contemporary art world met her for the first time in Tate Modern’s café: ‘I had no idea what she looked like but when she came through the entrance to the café I knew instantly it had to be her.’ She favours bleach blonde hair and likes wearing bright pink or bright red, or occasionally yellow. ‘You are not going to miss her,’ confirms Acoris Andipa, ‘but why not – after all, we are in the art game and you can be whoever you want to be. She’s dynamic and I think she genuinely has the best interest of Banksy within her. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of her, for sure.’

  A source closer to Banksy says she is a ‘hard woman, tough, mercurial, and a very good buffer protecting him. She blows hot and cold depending on what day of the week it is. But she more or less runs the business side of things and in a way she’s the perfect person to represent him. As for a gallery or representation, he is in such a strong position he doesn’t need one.’ However, there are many things that go with promoting an edgy but now quite expensive outsider like Banksy besides simply selling a painting. Like any other primary dealer, Lazarides was there to keep the clients happy, to promote the long-term relationship and to nurse Banksy’s prices up from one level to the next so he could reassure collectors that their money was safe. Banksy has changed so much in the art market, but it will take time to see if he can dispense with a Lazarides type of figure and still remain as successful.