Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  If you ever get beyond Holly Cushing the gatekeeper, what lies the other side of the gate? Is Banksy just Banksy or does he, like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, leave much of the hard work and, in his case, the illegal street work to assistants? Or would that be a step too far for a street artist? Both Hirst and Koons have employed up to 100 assistants in their time. Some of Murakami’s assistants, with his encouragement, have become artists in their own right. Hirst said that he got bored after his first five spot paintings – ‘I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it’ – and employed assistants to do the rest. This practice has become so widely accepted that it is only the fact that he is paying his assistants comparatively little when he makes so much that raises the odd eyebrow. But for Banksy the possibility of having one assistant, let alone 100, raises yet more accusations of ‘sell-out’ on the web.

  One of his outer circle describes how it all works: ‘If you are in the team it’s not like you are there nine to five every day of the week, but he can call on the team when needed – like the Bristol show, where you can see differences in the work. It has to be a team for the amount of work that is produced, but he is the conductor. He’s not like Damien Hirst where people are doing everything. He is very much involved.’

  His erstwhile printer Ben Eine makes much the same point. ‘He’s one person. Although now he’s so big, he’s a brand. So he has people working for him, especially when he makes big sculptures. But he still makes all his own paintings and cuts his own stencils.’

  There are some pieces which he must contract out although, importantly, the creative idea remains his. Banksy might be a very good stencil artist but that does not make him a good sculptor or a good producer of animatronics. Take for example the Banksy bronze rat, as endearing a rat as you will ever see. He stands about a foot high with a pack on his back and a baseball cap worn back to front, and he is wielding a paintbrush instead of a rifle. Sculpted in bronze and first seen in the exhibition in Los Angeles, later he popped up again hiding among the exhibits at Bristol Museum.

  This was a work where the inspiration came from Banksy but the key sculpting was done by one Charlie Becker, a successful New York sculptor – now resident in Los Angeles – who has done work for everyone from Faile to Nike. Back in 2007 he posted a slightly amazed message on his website: ‘A little while ago I got the honor of seeing a piece that I helped bring to life (for another artist) get sold like real art gets sold. At Sothebys, alongside Warhol, Basquiat, Damien Hirst and lots more. For a grip of cash too. Man, I need to get that catalog, gives me something to aspire to.’

  This was in the days when Banksy, and many others too, were bringing in funny money. The bronze rat, one of an edition of twelve, signed and dated by the artist on the underside, made £68,400 at Sotheby’s. Slightly less than a year later it went on sale at Sotheby’s in New York and this time the final bid was $169,000. In London in 2011 a unique version with acrylic paint on the brush made £163,250. So yes, it was a ‘real grip of cash’.

  Becker also had on his website a photograph of Banksy’s homeless Venus, which first appeared in the Barely Legal show in Los Angeles and re-emerged in Bristol, although by this time she had acquired the sort of dog that often accompanies beggars. Since most of the other Banksy sculptures are in this style, the assumption has to be that Charlie Becker has been Banksy’s favourite sculptor. As for the Pet Store animatronics that first appeared in New York in 2008 and reappeared in Bristol, they had to be made by model-makers of Hollywood standard. Hot dogs having sex, a rabbit polishing her nails – the skills to create these pieces could not be acquired overnight, even though Banksy was very much the inspiration, the creator of this wonderfully weird pet shop.

  Kate Brindley, who witnessed the Banksy team at work as they put together the exhibition at Bristol, says: ‘What working with Banksy means is working with a team of people who represent or are Banksy. Yes, I am sure there is an individual, but there is a whole lot of people who work with him to deliver on whatever his passion is. So whether the work is made in collaboration with them or whether it is all his idea frankly doesn’t bother me greatly. It might be all his idea but I’d be surprised, because actually most things are a team effort, aren’t they? Given the scale of what happened and what was produced, obviously he commissioned stuff, because it’s not all him making everything. But then that’s artists’ practice throughout the ages. That’s nothing new. Artists commission work and it’s theirs, they author it – as in the Renaissance, they had schools of assistants.’

  But what happens when Banksy hits the street? Are those all his pieces? The answer is that in a great majority of cases they are – but not always. There is at least one example of him paying signwriters to do his work for him – and he was open in saying what he had done. At the time of his Pet Store show in New York in 2008, four huge rats went up in the SoHo district of New York. Bloggers were excited: was it actually Banksy they had spotted on high, painting away so openly? Well no, actually it was a young ambitious company called Colossal Media, trying to reintroduce the art of hand-painted signs, who did the work.

  Today Colossal Media boast in their promotional material about the rats they drew for Banksy. ‘Colossal had to execute all four walls simultaneously while maintaining complete secrecy about the project.’ For months they worked with Banksy’s team ‘on site acquisition and preparation’. Banksy provided ‘digital renderings of hand drawn sketches’ which they then painted on to the walls. They are proud to claim that ‘Colossal’s role in the project was to function as any other artist’s tool – as a means to an end.’

  Banksy was open about it, despite his loathing of billboards. ‘I wanted to play the corporations at their own game, at the same scale and in the same locations. The advantage of billboard companies is that they’ll let you write anything for money, even if what you write is questioning the ethics of letting someone write anything because they have money.’

  But the next step, getting other people to do his street pieces, is more controversial and certainly less clear. Ben Eine was asked by the magazine Very Nearly Almost: ‘You used to paint with Banksy in the city, is it true you used to paint rats as well?’

  ‘I used to help him paint stuff on the street. At some point, yes, I would’ve painted a rat. But it wasn’t like I was going out with his stencils doing his rats.’

  The clearest statement comes from Shepard Fairey. Two possible Banksys had been spotted in Boston at the time of the release of Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was a cue for great excitement and efforts by the Boston Globe to discover whether or not they were real. The reporter could not of course get to Banksy but did talk to Fairey, who was very matter of fact: ‘Banksy doesn’t actually execute a lot of the street pieces anymore.’ So if it was a Banksy in Boston – and Fairey was very doubtful – it was not necessarily by Banksy. It may have been by his assistants: ‘To me, it doesn’t matter whether he was there. He orchestrated it. If you’re still into believing that Batman cleans up the city by himself, fine.’

  Quite how much or how little he uses assistants, or just friends out for the joyride, will probably never be clear. But the key point is this: without Banksy as the inspiration there would be no Banksys of any kind. As he himself says, ‘I paint my own pictures but I get a lot of help building stuff and installing it. I have a great little team.’

  And the more I examined this team, not just the team that is ready when he needs help with a big project, but also the more permanent team protecting his reputation, his commercial rights, his prices, the more it became clear that he functions in much the same way as any commercially successful artist would – albeit outside the traditional gallery system. And it is perhaps this fact, the fact that in many ways the outsider is now an insider, rather than any real worry about his identity, that this team – which makes very few mistakes – is so determined to hide.

  Ten

  The Business of Banksy

  In February 2008, seven mo
nths before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, at a time when people were still confident enough to splash big money on good causes, New York’s rich and famous gathered together at Sotheby’s for a night of serious spending. The event, organised by Bono, Damien Hirst, Sotheby’s and the Gagosian gallery, turned out to be the biggest charity art auction ever, raising $42.5m to support AIDS programmes in Africa.

  The auction had everything. As well as giving work himself, Damien Hirst hand wrote letters to each artist asking them to contribute their work. ‘I didn’t expect the result to be as good as it was, but everybody’s dug deep and given us major works rather than drawings and that. It feels like a real exhibition,’ he said. Bono was the star, wearing a black military-style jacket and sunglasses, exhorting the 700 guests to spend and spend again and, since it was Valentine’s Day, giving them an a capella version of ‘All You Need is Love’ to set them on their way.

  And he led by example, spending more than $1 million on several pieces for himself. Hirst gave seven works which made a total of just over $19 million, including Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way, a pill cabinet filled with drugs for the treatment of HIV, which sold for $7,150,000.

  It was a sort of Hello! love-in. John McEnroe, Martha Stewart, Queen Noor, Dennis Hopper, Michael Stipe, Helena Christensen, Liya Kebede, Russell Simmons, Ziyi Zhang and Christy Turlington (who spent $170,500 on a watercolour by Francisco Clemente – who some years earlier had painted her portrait) were a few of the headline names.

  Banksy was one of the artists Hirst had asked for help and he gave three pieces. Lot 69, Ruined Landscape, one of his detourned paintings, a rural scene with ‘This is not a photo opportunity’ pasted across it, sold for $385,000, just above the estimate.

  Lot 33A was his Vandalised Phone Box, a red telephone box bent to almost ninety degrees and bleeding red paint where a pickaxe had been stuck through it. The phone box had originally been placed in Soho Square but it was soon carted off by an unsympathetic Westminster Council because it did not have planning permission.

  Happily Banksy was allowed to claim it back, for now it went for $605,000, double the estimated price. Three years later the buyer was revealed to be another of those millionaires that Banksy complains about: Mark Getty, grandson of J. Paul Getty. He told the Sunday Telegraph, ‘I bought it as a joke – the phone box is being killed, see?’ The joke being that there were once rumours – untrue – that his billionaire grandfather had installed a pay phone to ensure guests would not make calls at his expense and this was his – costly – way of ‘killing off the phone box rumours’. The phone box now sits in front of the library on Getty’s 2500-acre estate in the Chiltern Hills.

  But it was Lot 34, Keep it Spotless, that had everyone excited. The story according to Hirst was that he had been rounding up work for the auction and Banksy told him, ‘Give me a painting and I’ll mess around with it.’ So Hirst had given him one of his spot paintings – it has always seemed as though he has quite a few to spare – and Banksy stencilled a maid hitching up the spots as though they were part of a curtain so she could brush away the dirt underneath. It was a clever piece, and before the auction Hirst showed the work to a reporter: ‘I love his work and I have to say I like my own,’ he said. ‘I think it looks brilliant, doesn’t it? Sweeping it under the carpet.’ The painting fetched $1.8 million, a price that put Banksy on a completely new level, although the joke at the time was that it was either a very expensive Banksy or a very cheap Hirst.

  The sale did two things. As Bono put it, ‘art and love, sex and money came together’ to raise a huge amount of money for AIDS work in Africa, but the auction also established price records for seventeen artists including Marc Quinn, Howard Hodgkin and Banksy himself. There was no instant reward other than a feel-good factor for Banksy, but other artists’ agents use auctions – and are sometimes actually bidding at them – as a way of establishing a public price which they can refer to when selling privately to collectors. So what this auction did for Banksy and other artists was to reassure collectors, particularly in a year when the financial world was collapsing all around them, that the prices they were paying privately were supported – and indeed in this case far surpassed – in the auction houses.

  Keep it Spotless had all the charity hype behind it and, perhaps more important, the fact that it was a Hirst painting that Banksy had defaced. In the real world his prices were nowhere close to what was paid for Keep it Spotless, but they were jumping up in astounding amounts. In June 2005 a record for a Banksy original was set at £21,000; just over a year later his Mona Lisa sold for £57,600. In 2007, the year after Barely Legal in Los Angeles had opened up the American market, it was difficult to keep track of the increase. Bombing Middle England fetched £102,000 in February; Space Girl and Bird had an estimated price of £10,000 to £15,000 but sold at Bonhams in April for £288,000, and The Rude Lord reached £322,900 at Sotheby’s in October. Bonhams followed this up with their first ‘Urban Art’ sale in February 2008, which essentially gave street artists a category all of their own – a slightly less threatening category than ‘street art’ itself or ‘graffiti art’. But whatever it was called, it was the night that street art was seduced, without too much of a struggle, into the mainstream and Gareth Williams, Bonhams’ Urban Art specialist, remembers it well. ‘The first sale was phenomenal beyond belief. I had been working at an auction house for fifteen years and never seen anything like it. The global press interest was just crazy. We were late in starting the sale, so many people were there; they were queuing to register so we couldn’t actually start on time. All the Banksys commanded good prices, but it wasn’t just Banksy, the whole sale sold with the exception of one lot.’

  So how important is Banksy in this whole urban art world? ‘Very important. He kind of kick-started the market. There are lots of other artists out there who are equally deserving, but I am not necessarily convinced they would have had so much limelight and achieved such good results without him. He’s a household name. Everyone’s grandma knows Banksy.’

  At the end of that same month Sotheby’s put up for sale Banksy’s Simple Intelligence Testing with an estimated price of £150,000. It is a work in five parts where a monkey finds the right box with the bananas hidden in it, but then outwits his intelligence testers first by eating the bananas and then by escaping through a vent in the ceiling. It fetched £636,500, which apart from that achieved by Keep It Spotless remains by far the highest price ever paid for a Banksy. Simple Intelligence Testing had been painted in 2000 and sold at the Severnshed exhibition, so it would have been the original buyer who made the money rather than Banksy.

  But he would have done better out of Rude Lord, an eighteenth-century portrait of an aristocrat by Thomas Beach for which Banksy paid £2000 and then detourned so that the aristocrat was giving us all the finger. He finished the painting in 2006, in time for his Los Angeles show, and then Steve Lazarides sold it on to a collector who swiftly put it into auction. This very short chain of events all happened within the space of a year, so it is one painting in these early auctions where Banksy would have received, if not the auction price, then at least a decent price for his work. But for the most part, as Banksy put it, ‘The auction houses were just selling paintings that I’d done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, you know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like fifty grand.’

  Although no Banksy work has gone beyond the price of Simple Intelligence Testing, it is still a pretty golden ceiling for any artist to reach, particularly a graffiti artist. Indeed it is this street art background that is his problem. Compared to the likes of Hirst or Jeff Koons, Banksy is a pauper; comfortable, making good money, but not a multi-millionaire. He says, ‘I don’t have a lavish lifestyle,’ and others support him. A collector agrees that ‘He’s pretty low maintenance’ and Mike Snelle, director of the influential Shoreditch gallery Black Rat Projects, says: ‘From what I’m told he’s not living in a dream ma
nsion with a pool. He lives in an ordinary house and gives a lot of the money away. People like Banksy aren’t people who want to buy Porsches and Rolexes and things.’

  But with graffiti there are – or there were – a different set of rules. If street art is somehow free art for the people, then what is it doing fetching such high prices in the auction houses? Andy Warhol in the past seemed positively to enjoy the fact that he could make so much money from his art, as does Damien Hirst today, but with Banksy it sits uneasily; it might well be temptingly enjoyable, but he still finds it slightly difficult to square with the softly leftish view of the world that comes through in his work.

  Having complained about art galleries becoming trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires, he has now found himself becoming one of the trophies and he doesn’t like it – although the money may have proved handy. It was at the time of all the excitement about the prices he was achieving that he released a print known as Morons. An auctioneer is shown hard at work taking bids for a painting which is displayed on a stand next to him. The reference Banksy used in making this print is almost certainly the sale of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers back in 1987 for what then seemed an astonishing world record price of £25 million. But the canvas the auctioneer is selling has no sunflowers, only the words ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MORONS ACTUALLY BUY THIS SHIT’ scrawled across it. When the print of the picture went up for sale on his website, the sales pitch was not the usual kind: ‘Banksy makes a cr*p picture about how people pay a lot of money for cr*p pictures, which someone then ends up paying a lot of money for. A portion of irony eating itself, anyone?’