Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  ‘When my number was eventually called to go in and buy my print, I pumped my fist and walked in to the store.’ He had his Banksy. He says now that it is not his favourite Banksy image but ‘it was my first Banksy and one that will be on my wall for ever.’

  The Banksy queue has become something of a club. One successful member of this ‘club’ says, ‘You got to remember we meet every year and there are people there you’ve met at the last sale and they just come up to you saying “Oh, how you doing?”; it’s lovely, it’s a really nice community, but the problem you’ve got is that before I had collected my print of Choose Your Weapon somebody at the front of the queue had already put theirs on eBay for £10,000.’ He says the Choose Your Weapon queue was the only bad queue he has experienced: ‘There were fights and all sorts, it was scary.’ And while in a way it seems amazing to queue all night for a piece of art, in many ways it seems rather more admirable (and profitable too, if you want it to be) than queuing all night for, say, a football ticket or a good view of the royal wedding or the New Year sales. (Banksy eventually issued a further edition of fifty-eight prints in ‘Queue Jumper Edition (Warm Grey)’ for those who missed out in the scrum at Shoreditch and had their names and details taken by one of his staff.) As for me, I stayed warm and comfortable, but unhappily my number never came up in the online lottery.

  Banksy took close to £200,000 for this one print but did not keep any of it for himself. He donated all the money from the proceeds to the Russian art collective Voina – war in Russian – which performs public protest happenings that include everything from orgies to throwing cats at bored McDonald’s workers on International Workers’ Day. When he decided to make the donation, two of Voina’s members were in jail charged with aggravated hooliganism and facing a prison sentence of up to five years. Lucy Ash had reported on their deeds on the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent, detailing how they had painted an erect penis on a drawbridge across the River Neva in St Petersburg. Every time the drawbridge opened, the penis, 65m tall and 27m across, was there in all its glory opposite the building which is the local headquarters of the KGB’s successors, the Federal Security Service. (The penis reached a shortlist for a state prize for contemporary art, mysteriously slipping off the list and then reemerging as the winner, with $14,000 being awarded to the group.) Rather more seriously, the group had overturned seven police cars in protest against police corruption.

  Banksy must have been one of the people listening to her report, for soon afterwards she was in Italy about to interview the mayor of an impoverished hilltop village when her mobile rang. ‘It felt a bit surreal and I wondered at first if the call was a hoax,’ she reported. ‘After all, it is not every day you get phoned up by one of the world’s most elusive artists.’ It was not actually Banksy but his ubiquitous PR Jo Brooks, who told her that Banksy wanted to help.

  ‘How much do you reckon it’ll cost,’ Brooks asked, ‘to get them out?’

  ‘Uncharacteristically, I was lost for words. I mumbled that I was not sure whether he could help get them out of prison, but that I was certain that the artists would be most grateful for his support.’

  In very simple terms the donation worked – and there was still a lot of it to spend, which they say will in turn be used to help ‘political prisoners’. Early in 2011, after almost four months in jail, they were released, having posted bail of 300,000 roubles, about £6500 each. Although their troubles were far from over, Banksy had secured their release from prison, even if he could not get rid of the charges against them. He had also raised their profile across the web to a level they could never have dreamed of, and this perhaps had made them just a little safer.

  There are many ways Banksy could make more money. He could take a few of the commercial jobs offered to him – if Blek le Rat can don a Hugo Boss suit to judge a Hugo Boss stencil competition, then why not Banksy at what would probably be a much higher price? He could license the Banksy brand. He could put up the price of his prints. He could keep more of the money he does make by cutting back on the eclectic range of good causes he supports. He could accept the sort of interior commissions now on offer – the late Gunter Sachs’ castle at Lake Worth in Austria is one of the best examples of graffiti taken on to inside walls. Yet even though he does none of these things he still can’t win, he will still be accused of being a sell-out. Thus he remembers the time he went to see the film Precious, where they played the trailer for Exit Through the Gift Shop before the main feature. It was not an enjoyable experience: ‘Someone two rows in front shouted “OH MY GOD, BANKSY IS SUCH A SELL-OUT” and I shrank into my seat.’

  Ever since starting this book I have been getting Banksy birthday cards and Banksy Christmas cards and plain Banksy cards from friends who thought I needed encouragement. Banksy makes no money out of those at all. The graffiti is ‘attributed to Banksy’ but the copyright of the photograph of Banksy’s work is with the photographer and the card company. All the mugs, the cards, the cheaply printed canvases, the iPod skins, the laptop covers, the Banksy buttons, even the ‘Banksy style’ decorative wall stickers, are rip-offs. The producers of all these money-spinners are no doubt encouraged by the words of Banksy himself who told the Sunday Times ‘if you’ve built a reputation on having a casual attitude towards property ownership, it seems a bit bad-mannered to kick off about copyright law.’ Unless he has some secret licensing deal, which seems very unlikely indeed, he has nothing to do with any of them; he just happens to produce the art on the streets for others to profit from.

  While the souvenirs could possibly be money-making ventures for him, he could make much bigger money if he was prepared to do commercial work. For, as graffiti crosses over to the mainstream – brand managers now reference his work as ‘intelligent mischief’ – there could be no greater prize than having Banksy as your figurehead.

  As far back as 2003 he was being courted for advertising jobs. The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone asked him if there was work he would turn down on principle. He replied: ‘Yeah, I’ve turned down four Nike jobs now. Every new campaign they email me to ask me to do something about it. I haven’t done any of those jobs. The list of jobs I haven’t done now is so much bigger than the list of jobs I have done. It’s like a reverse CV, kinda weird. Nike have offered me mad money for doing stuff.’

  ‘Never’ is a dangerous word to use, but three years later he told his friend Shepard Fairey: ‘I don’t do anything for anybody any more, and I will never do a commercial job again.’ He explained in some detail why he had done the cover for the Blur album, not that anyone was accusing him of selling out over that. ‘I’ve done a few things to pay the bills, and I did the Blur album. It was a good record and it was quite a lot of money. I think that’s a really important distinction to make. If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial. Otherwise you’ve got to be a socialist rejecting capitalism altogether, because the idea that you can marry a quality product with a quality visual and be a part of that even though it’s capitalistic is sometimes a contradiction you can’t live with. But sometimes it’s perfectly symbiotic, like the Blur situation.’

  Very early on in his career he said, ‘I’m kind of old fashioned in that I like to eat so it’s always good to earn money.’ He does make good money, but he could both make more and keep more than he does. ‘I have been called a sell-out but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want. I think it was easier when I was the underdog, and I had a lot of practice at it,’ he told the New Yorker. ‘The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that’s an easy problem to solve – you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for me.’ He went on, ‘I love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies.’

  There is no Banksy Foundation giving away money publicly; it’
s all done on a very ad hoc basis, with no ostentation. This makes it completely impossible to give a fair picture of what he gives away. But at one end there is the £1.5 million raised at the New York charity auction. At the other end there are the smaller gifts, like the hand-finished print of Nola (a young girl sheltering from the rain under her umbrella, originally put up in New Orleans to commemorate the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina) which sold for almost £7000 at the annual art auction that Inkie organises to raise funds for a complicated operation for deaf children at Great Ormond Street hospital. It all adds up.

  Apart from Voina there was £165,000 for Sightsavers from the release of the print Flag in 2006/7. There was a further £25,000 he raised for Sightsavers in 2008 by organising a raffle at his gallery when he released his new limited edition print Very Little Helps. The tickets cost £1 each with a maximum of twenty per person, and people queued for up to three hours to buy them. This raffle is another good measure of his following, for these were not tickets to win the print but simply to win the right to buy the print. Among the auction of original work, there was the £30,000 raised for Moorfields Eye Hospital and another £30,000 for a drop-in centre for asylum seekers run by the New North London Synagogue.

  Then too there was a piece sold for £46,000 for the ‘Defenestration Project’ in San Francisco, a hotel building abandoned since 1989 which had been turned into a piece of art with all sorts of furniture, grandfather clocks, fridges, tables, chairs, sofas creeping out of every exit at every level of the four-storey building and staying stuck there. An appeal had been launched to raise funds so that all this outside-inside furniture, and the building itself, could be given a much-needed tarting up. When I first looked at the website for the project it had one of those sort of thermometers with a $75,000 goal and a line showing $30,000 had been raised. It was the kind of device that used to sit outside churches in the hope that it would encourage people to give and which, if there was not much progress towards the target after a few years, always began to look very sad. This one too looked like it would take for ever, but suddenly Banksy came along and the thermometer must have exploded. The very nature of the project probably appealed to him too; like his street work, the entire building will disappear, probably by the spring of 2013, to be replaced by a block of affordable apartments.

  There was a print that raised £8000 for Rowdy, a graffiti artist from way back who had lost his house and his studio in a fire. There was also money for the failed campaign to re-elect Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London – hardly a charity, but nevertheless Livingstone benefited by £120,000 from the auction of a canvas in a complicated but legal arrangement set up to avoid Banksy having to reveal his true name as a donor to his campaign.

  And there was Santa’s Ghetto in Bethlehem in 2007. Again this shows Banksy’s skills not just as an artist but as an organiser, coordinator, target-picker, the man who can make things happen. It was Banksy who rounded everyone up. In the New Statesman the artist Peter Kennard later recalled: ‘The phone rings; the number is withheld. It’s Banksy. He wants to know whether I can go to Bethlehem over Christmas. He is putting on an exhibition, bringing together like-minded artists from all over the world to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine. Two weeks later, I find myself involved in an experience that transforms my ideas about what artists can do in the face of oppression.’

  Banksy made a similar call to almost twenty different artists across the world. He and his team got there first, both to organise and to find good sites on the wall for his own work. Working to a very tight deadline, they rented a disused chicken restaurant in Manger Square, transforming it virtually overnight into an art gallery. He was followed in two bursts by the great and the good of the street art world, who would both draw worldwide attention to the wall and donate all their art for sale at Santa’s Ghetto. Of Banksy’s own work, a dove wearing a bulletproof vest was perhaps the most arresting image; however, my favourite, a donkey having its identity papers checked by an Israeli soldier, caused unexpected trouble since the donkey was seen by some locals as portraying Palestinians in a rather unfavourable light. His colleague Tristan Manco wrote delicately: ‘Given the local problems and high sensitivities, perhaps irony is not embraced in the same way in Bethlehem as it might be in London.’ But whatever anyone’s sensitivities the gallery, which existed for only one month, raised over $1 million. This money went to provide thirty university places for students who otherwise would never have had the chance to get anywhere close to university, as well as other good causes in the area.

  Of course this money was not all from Banksy. Every artist who arrived in Bethlehem contributed to the gallery, but again he was the man who made it all happen. There is no ‘school of Banksy’ but he has a remarkable if loose gang of other street artists stretched across the world who think in much the same way he does. As for the money he makes, he keeps to his word, he does not ‘trouser all the cash’: he gives chunks of it away, maybe not enough to satisfy his critics but enough to make a difference to the odd assortment of people and causes that he chooses to support.

  Eleven

  Faking It

  I have a Banksy on my wall. If I was trying to sell it, which I am not, I suppose I would say something like: ‘Girl with Balloon, Banksy. Giclée two colour print on Matt Paper 30 by 42, unsigned.’ And if anyone bought it they would be a mug, because it is barely worth the paper it is printed on. So is it a fake? Well, no. Is it an original? No, it’s obviously not that either. In the world of art there are many variations possible between these extremes, and in the world of Banksy there are inevitably extra twists to the tale.

  On his website Banksy has a collection of about a dozen of his pictures and he says, ‘You’re welcome to download whatever you wish from this site for personal use. However making your own art or merchandise and passing it off as “official” or authentic Banksy artwork is bad and very wrong.’

  So I accepted his invitation and went to my local print shop, where we downloaded the print for nothing. Girl with Balloon is one of his most popular and poignant images and although ambiguity is part of the picture’s charm, it looks to me as if the little girl watching her heart-shaped balloon float away, string still trailing, is wishing it well rather than crying after it. At first the printers muttered slightly about the print being too ‘low res’ (low resolution). But they had a solution: shrink it to half the size. They encouraged me by saying that the very nature of the spray-painted image worked in our favour; the image was a bit fuzzy round the edges anyway, so what difference would it make if it printed out just that little bit more fuzzy? We agreed to give it a try.

  They printed it out, using an inkjet printer (‘giclée’ is the posh word for an inkjet print, although both the ink and the paper would usually be of a considerably higher grade than the ingredients we were using). And there it was, my very own Banksy, looking very nice too. I took it to John Lewis and splurged £25 on a wooden frame which, added to the print shop cost, meant a grand total of £40. A bargain, especially since the last price I could find at auction of an unsigned Girl with Balloon was £1800 for a limited edition print, or an original canvas for £46,000. I had followed Banksy’s website instructions and I had not done anything that was ‘bad’ or ‘very wrong’, and the girl and her balloon sit very appropriately in my wife’s therapy office, where so much of the talk is about ‘letting go’.

  Apart from giving me considerable pleasure – thank you, Banksy – what this print shows is just how easy it is to copy a Banksy. You can go on the web and find a whole mini-industry of Banksy copies there. In fact I could have bought my Balloon Girl from canvastown.com, which claims to be ‘the largest retail Banksy graffiti specialist in the world’, for £20 plus £5 delivery charge. It was unframed but it was on stretched canvas, so perhaps mine was not such a bargain. (When I telephoned canvastown.com to discuss their marketing of Banksy prints they put down the phone on me.)

  But, leaving aside the question of copyrig
ht, these canvases, bought so easily on the web, are not fakes; they are simply copies. It is only when a seller attempts to deceive a buyer into believing that what is being sold is an authentic and authorised Banksy product, whether it be a print, a canvas or anything else, that a copy becomes a fake. It is tempting though, for if you want to sell your copy, claiming it is authenticated, you have the added encouragement: the artist you are faking is himself in a vague way wanted by the police. As Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, who headed Scotland Yard’s Art & Antiques Unit for nine years, told The Art Newspaper, ‘There is an assumption that Banksy is not going to stand up in court and say “Oi, that’s my work you are copying.”’ This combination of relative ease and an artist who is – or was – not too bothered by copyright is altogether too much temptation for some.

  But Banksy’s anonymity offers another temptation too, the temptation to be Banksy either by trying to paint like him or by assuming his identity on the web. Not for money, but for kicks. Artists who spray Banksy-like images on walls presumably sit back and watch as the web debates whether this is a real Banksy or just a lookalike. It must be satisfying for a Banksy wannabe to witness the debate and the fact that sometimes people can’t tell the difference – ‘So what’s Banksy got that I haven’t got?’ For example, in June 2010 a couple of stencils appeared on the wall of a pub garden in Primrose Hill, London. A hooded artist, who arrived in the middle of the night, was filmed at work by the pub’s CCTV cameras. It looked as though he was taking too long to be a proper hit-and-run graffiti artist, but no matter, for a few excited days it was thought to be a Banksy. The pub was about to come up for auction and the owners must have hoped they would be selling off both pub and Banksy, but they were disappointed. Before the auction took place Jo Brooks pronounced: ‘It’s a fake, I can’t say more than that.’ (The pub fetched £1.59 million anyway.)