Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  An edition was printed in Los Angeles at the time of his big show there and a much larger edition was subsequently issued in the UK, bringing the total number of prints to just over 1000. Banksy took at least £120,000 from these prints; he could have taken much more, for they were soon selling in the auction houses for up to £5000, but nevertheless it was an enjoyable example of him having his cake and eating it too.

  As is the case with almost any artist, the price private collectors pay for his paintings is impossible to establish accurately. However, there are two ways of getting some sort of feeling about the prices for Banksy’s originals. The first is through the auction houses, where the prices are visible and can be tracked over the years. The website artnet.com, which has emerged as the art world’s key recorder of auction prices on the internet, shows the way new collectors with new money bounded into the Banksy market in 2007, sustained it throughout 2008 and then paused for a very deep breath. The market in Banksys, like that in most other commodities, has yet to reach those heights again, although it would be unfair to suggest there has been too much of a bubble – his prices remain strong, just not as strong.

  If you look at Banksy’s prices recorded on the web, no post-2008 price comes in the top ten. Insane Clown, which sold in New York in November 2009 for $386,500, reaches number 11. His prices in 2010 and 2011 have averaged around £56,000. Compare this with 2008, where anyone with a Banksy on the wall suddenly realised they could be rich. The canvases coming to market were double the number available in 2010 and the average price was around £100,000 – and that excludes the three sold for record amounts in the New York charity auction. Even some of his prints were reaching figures of around £5000 and occasionally nearer to £10,000.

  But if you wanted to sell, you had to hurry, because from July 2008 onwards, as the world financial markets fretted and failed, an increasing number of Banksys were marked ‘Bought In’ because they did not reach their reserve price. December 2008 was a particularly dismal month when twenty-eight lots were auctioned, all but one of them prints, but only two sold; the rest had to be bought in. Sellers either had to lower their prices or wait for better days. But a collector, particularly anyone buying a canvas, today can be reassured that although the market has fallen from its height, it is still a healthy one.

  The other source is the accounts for Pest Control Office Ltd, Banksy’s company, which has taken over his sales from Steve Lazarides. Although the details are scant, the way he has chosen to run his business life through private limited companies means, ironically, that there is probably more financial information publicly available on the anonymous Banksy than on any other artist. In June 2010 Pest Control’s assets were £1.1 million, a figure that had jumped by a hefty £900,000 in the year after Lazarides left. There is no way of telling in these abbreviated accounts where exactly all this £900,000 came from, but it is a reasonable assumption to make that a very high percentage of it came from the sale of Banksy originals.

  The prints are easier to track than the canvases, because they are all sold through his website and the prices have been there for all to see. Banksy’s prints are a phenomenon in themselves. As we have seen, he started out like any other artist, selling prints to any gallery that would take them. You could usually pick them up for £40 unsigned or £100 signed. But then as the demand grew he discovered that he did not need galleries at all. He was selling to a computer-literate generation, and although some preferred to go to Banksy’s gallery in Shoreditch and queue for hours for a newly released print, many were happy to see a print online, buy it online and then put it up on their wall without ever putting a foot inside a gallery.

  If they decided they didn’t like their print, or decided simply that they wanted to make money out of it, there was always eBay. They weren’t stuck with it – they could make an instant profit. As one dealer says: ‘Banksy wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for eBay. The two just happened to come along at the same time. It was happenstance rather than planning. No one flipped art before then. It just hadn’t happened. But with Banksy people queued for four or five hours for a print and by the time they were out of the queue it would be on eBay.’

  ‘All of a sudden it was like the new gold rush,’ says Steve Lazarides. ‘You could go out, buy a Banksy print at 250 quid. The next day you could sell it for two and a half grand. What other investment is going to make ten times your money overnight?

  ‘And then the next owner, if they were lucky, could sell it on again for five grand . . . so it was a no-brainer in those days of easy credit.

  ‘We’d open a show and you’d have people running at you. You’d be trying to sell something to a client and you’d have someone tapping you on the shoulder . . . saying “No, no, I want to buy it.” There was one instance where we caught someone flipping a work in the gallery before they’d even paid for it.’

  For Banksy this posed a problem that he has never quite dealt with, one to which it is actually impossible for him to find the right answer. He wanted to keep his prints at prices not too far removed from what his original fans could pay, but as he said, ‘Every time I sell things at a discount rate, most people put them on eBay and make more money than I charged them in the first place. The novelty with that soon wears off.’ His prices have gone up steadily, if slowly – but so too has demand. A Banksy print can still be flipped very profitably on eBay, although the seller will not make the money they could have made in the boom years.

  His print operation is unique both in its scale and in its demand. Go back through the old web postings when a rumour went out that a Banksy print was about to be launched and you will see how the hardcore Banksy fans went mental. Reading these postings now on the Urban Art Association website it seems comic, but at the time it became a matter of life and death for those involved in the chase. A millisecond after a print was released, the buyer had to be on the Banksy website and putting the print in their basket or else it was too late. Either the site crashed because everyone was on it, or the prints had all gone. Some took the afternoon off, the day off, or chose to ‘work at home’, while others stayed up in the hope that it would be released in the dead of night. For Banksy has always been a bit of a tease; the word would go out that a print was going to be released but no definite date or time was given as to when. Desperate buyers discussed the latest rumour on the site as they waited: ‘Stuff like this makes me a nervous wreck for days and nights.’ They dared not leave their computer: ‘I’m a diabetic and I’m going to miss lunch because of this. If I die can I sue?’ ‘I need to pee. Can I wait – no. I bet it drops now.’ This could go on and on for days; then suddenly, instantly it was there, and then it was gone. Despair followed: ‘It’s sold out, gone, goodbye.’ ‘f**k missed it.’ ‘Did anyone get one?’ ‘I need this. Anyone who carted it and doesn’t want it I got 1000 pounds!’ ‘Went into a meeting and just got out and they’re all sold out. Gutted.’ ‘I want to cry . . .’ ‘. . . Get in the queue.’ But there was also unadulterated joy: ‘Got one yeahhhhhhhhhh. Three years of just losing out and now I bag my first Banksy.’ And this joy was sometimes coupled with a hint of profit to come: ‘Yessss. My first Banksy Yess. What’s the edition size?’ Recently this online agony has largely been eliminated, for there is now a lottery system online, as well as the chance to queue all night for those who don’t want to trust to luck.

  There is a site on the web called www.banksy-prints.com. It is a work in progress, although midway through 2010 it seemed to run out of progress, but someone with impressive dedication has tried to catalogue every Banksy print, for no visible financial reward. With the help of other websites, particularly www.UrbanArtAssociation.org. and www.thebanksyforum.com, and from talking to collectors, it is possible to give a rough outline of the Banksy print operation. In all he has created forty-eight different limited edition prints over eight years. They used to be divided unequally between signed and unsigned but more recently they are all coming signed – which makes them more di
fficult to fake. They have brought in at least £3.8 million and probably a fair bit more, since on the occasions when the size of the print run or the exact price is unclear I have gone in my calculations for a lower figure. In addition this sum does not account for the very limited number of artist’s proofs which come with any print run. His highest figure was attained in 2006, when a run of six prints first shown in Los Angeles raised over £1 million. In 2002 he needed to sell fifteen different prints to make just under £500,000. In 2009 he could make the same money by releasing just two.

  His most successful print was the portrait of Kate Moss, done in very much the same style as Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which is considered the holy grail by many collectors. It was far more expensive at source than any other Banksy print before or after, so it is not representative of Banksy prints in general; it is almost as though he was saying ‘This is what I could do if I was really trying to make money.’ It was first shown at the Crude Oils exhibition in Notting Hill along with all the rats. There were five canvases at £5000 each, thus £25,000, but interestingly, some fans consider the prints better than the canvases. One collector suggests, ‘The image works far better aesthetically as a print: clean, graphic and luxurious. For me the texture of the canvas weakens the overall impact – looking rather cheap, like the inkjet on canvas images you can order through Snappy Snaps.’

  The prints came in an edition of fifty at £1500 each – but despite the price they sold out, so that was another £75,000. Two months later, in another nod to Andy Warhol and his different colourways – Mint Marilyn, Cherry Marilyn, Orange Marilyn and so on – Banksy issued six further colourways. There were twenty of each colour. These prints were £2500 each – although, rather like being at a supermarket, you could have six for the price of five. So a set would cost you £12,500. This release would have brought in an additional £250,000.

  At this point, with the print and the five canvases having already raised £350,000, it becomes more difficult. For there were a further twelve artist’s proofs of the colourways edition and five of the original edition on canvas. It is impossible to tell what happened to these, although when Steve Lazarides opened his gallery in Soho an artist’s proof of Kate Moss was selling for £4000. At a conservative estimate Banksy, or rather Banksy, his gallery Pictures on Walls and Lazarides, must together have made at least £400,000 from Kate Moss, and probably a fair amount more.

  But this is nothing compared to what the buyers made. (The highest price reached at auction for Kate has been £96,000 in 2008, although the auction price is usually around the £40,000 to £50,000 mark.) Looking around an exhibition of prints at the Black Rat Gallery, I came across a Kate Moss which looked stunning hung against the gallery’s bare brick walls. It was marked ‘Price on Application’ and when I duly applied, Mike Snelle, the director of the gallery, told me that he was selling it on behalf of a collector who had already turned down an offer well above £100,000.

  I told him how much I liked it but asked him what Kate was adding to Marilyn – she might be an icon but she is certainly not up there in the icon charts with the likes of Marilyn. There was a pause and he then replied: ‘I could say Kate Moss. I guess I think it’s playing with the original Warhol idea. I think the way to view it is that there is a whole generation of people now who perhaps haven’t been very interested in art in the past who have come to art through street art and who will recognise the Banksy version of the Warhol over the original Warhol. I think that’s a very Warhol idea.’

  So will they even know that there is a Warhol version? ‘I think they will, but they might know it subsequently to seeing this one. And I think there is something interesting to that idea. Something playful and clever about it.’ Clever in what way? ‘Clever in the idea of celebrity fame, modern culture and the idea that you can distort something to the point where you can change the meaning of it so that the original version is no longer recognised and it’s a back to front thing. People are seeing that and learning about the Warhol. And there is something slightly subversive about that idea.’

  At the end of 2010 I decided it was time to enter the Banksy market myself. In October a new Banksy appeared on a wall in Southwark, a barking dog painted very deliberately in the style of Keith Haring being taken for a walk on a chain by a hoodie who looked as menacing as the dog. Just over a month later Banksy opened his annual Christmas show, although this year it was called Marks & Stencils rather than the usual Santa’s Ghetto. Having heard via the web that the Southwark stencil had now been turned into a new print which would be released during this exhibition, I took myself down to the empty shop on Berwick Street in Soho which he had taken over for Marks & Stencils. Admittedly it was not a big space; nevertheless there was still a queue at the door. As I stood waiting in the freezing cold I thought it might be hype, it might be greed or, forget the cynicism, it might just actually be people interested in street art . . . but what other modern artist could set up in a shop and have a queue standing on a freezing cold winter’s day waiting to get in? I stood in this queue for about half an hour. On one side of the street I could examine Banksy’s shop window, inside which a newly constructed breezeblock wall advertised ‘Street Art now in a gallery near you’ and a teddy bear sat slightly lewdly on a plaster column (well, this was Soho). On the opposite side of the street, Seymores World offered XXX DVDs, as well as Delay Spray, Spanish Fly and Spankarama DVDs.

  Eventually I was let in to two floors of Banksarama. This, like his other Ghetto shows, was anything but a white-walled space. There was no space on any wall; every inch was taken in a deliberate jumble of work, while the basement was given over to Dran, a vaguely subversive French street artist many of whose works were painted on cardboard. In amongst all this, but not given any special prominence, was the print of the hoodie with his dog – it now had a name, Choose Your Weapon. This surely was too good to be true, a Banksy print there for me after only half an hour’s queuing. Of course it was a fantasy: you could look but you could not buy.

  For that you had to wait for the off, announced via email by Banksy’s gallery. And Banksy was teasing yet again, for almost every day there was a new email to be found from the gallery, frustratingly titillating, announcing the release of more prints from the show, but none of them by Banksy. Finally the day arrived. The price was £450. There were 175 available online – the names would be drawn by lottery, so I did not have to sit up all night hitting the refresh button. Or if you wanted to go down to queue all night at the gallery, there would be another 200 on sale.

  I have to confess that the thought of an all-night queue in December in Shoreditch was too much for me. I applied online. And, reading the blog artonanisland.blogspot.com, I was very glad I did. The blogger, Evan Schiff, a Californian in his early thirties who had been living in London for three years, heard the rumour that the print was about to be released, so at 9 p.m. on Friday night he hurried down to Soho. He was about 180th in line! An hour and a half later the news was out: the prints would go on sale the next morning but they would be sold from Banksy’s gallery, Pictures on Walls in Shoreditch.

  ‘You’ve never seen so many people move that fast’, he blogged. ‘People running through the streets of central London trying to buy cabs from others who were waiting. I started a mad dash with two guys who were in back of me in line. They had a car and I did a few calculations and thought I’d get there quickest with them. I reckon it took about twenty-five minutes. We parked about three blocks before POW’s showroom. In a dead sprint we ran to the queue and when the dust settled, ended up being about 150th in line. Result!

  ‘Having come straight from work I wasn’t prepared for the cold at all. No sleeping bag, no long underwear, I hadn’t even worn my scarf that day. However, nervous that in the 10 minutes it would take for me to run home they’d pass out tickets and I’d miss out, I stayed the course.

  ‘The night from 2–6am was fairly uneventful save for the odd fight (two that I counted) or figuring out
who was gonna walk across the street to get tea (which started the night at about 50p a cup and ended the night at a pound a cup). However, at about 6:30 our second bout of absolute bedlam. A security guard/POW person showed up with tickets. And the queue absolutely imploded. People from the back running to the front, people at the front trying to fight them off. And perhaps worst of all, CARLOADS of people pulling up and walking right up to the ticket dude and getting their tickets. It was terrible.’ He was being pushed further and further down the queue.

  ‘Once all the touts and queue jumpers were sorted out the fat bald security guy started making his way through the line. I was nervous as hell, cracked out from being up all night, and just hoping me and the people I was with would be sorted out. As he came closer to us (I was about 10 people away at this point) he got to number 170 and said “that’s it, that’s the last number.”

  ‘Devastation. I can’t believe I waited that bloody long for NOTHING.’

  He had started on his way home when a couple of people who were behind him in the queue stopped their taxi and told him to get in. They had heard a hint that there might be a few more prints on sale back at Marks & Stencils. He arrived there to find he was number seventeen in the queue. This time they established their own rules, drawing numbers on everyone’s hand.

  ‘At 9am, the first employee showed up and we went up to him. “We’re here, we will gladly go home, please just tell us if we can buy a print here.” “We have 60 prints for you here.” Absolute bedlam. He passes out tickets and for the next few hours we all sat around telling stories, talking art, and really enjoying each other’s company.