Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  A much more convincing stencil of a pouting girl clutching her own Oscar appeared soon after the 2011 Academy Awards ceremony on a wall in Weston-super-Mare (Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop had been nominated for Best Documentary but failed to win, which might explain why the girl was pouting). Never mind that Weston-super-Mare is quite a distance from Los Angeles, it is only about twenty miles from Bristol, so this was hailed as Banksy’s ‘response’ to the Oscars and very rapidly covered in Perspex to preserve it. MelroseandFairfax, the usually reliable West Coast bloggers of the LA street art scene, fell for this new Banksy and even told us what it meant. ‘This new piece seems to say “I’m going to take my ball and go home” and at the same time poke fun at the very idea of the award.’ However it only took a few days before the Banksy cognoscenti declared it a fake and MelroseandFairfax had to admit they had made a mistake – ‘Fakesy not a Banksy.’ They went on to describe the problems they face: ‘Each day, we get a half dozen tips that there might be a new Banksy, and most of the time we can sift through to tell what is a Banksy and what is not. We got fooled on this one. We screwed up, and we can admit when we’re wrong.’

  But in addition to these Banksy wannabes there is another small but distinct group who are not interested in painting like him but in a weird and slightly spooky way want the world to accept them as Banksy: if the world doesn’t know who he is, why can’t he be me? When I first started on the Banksy trail I went on the web and very quickly – a little too quickly – came across a filmed interview with Banksy on YouTube. There he was in the flesh, eating a slice of pizza and chatting to us rather fiercely. The camera was darting all over the place but it was still very possible to identify him. He was pronouncing angrily in an accent that was more South London than Bristol, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that you can make art about world poverty, hunger, violence, horror, all the fucking horrible shit that goes on in this world and then trouser loads of cash for it . . . it don’t get better than that, does it?’ The last time I saw the video a quarter of a million people had viewed it, probably thinking like me that they had fallen upon Banksy. But by the end of the two and a half minutes it was clear it couldn’t be him: too much ‘fucking this’ and ‘fucking that’ for one thing, too many face shots for another. And perhaps most interesting was that somehow I held an image of the anonymous Banksy as being rather a nice, cuddly bloke, and this guy wasn’t nice at all; he didn’t fit my image of who he should be.

  But at least he wasn’t causing anyone any trouble. At the time of Banksy’s exhibition in Bristol, however, the Guardian carried an interview with him at the back of the Guide which comes out every Saturday. It was all a bit jokey and it was conducted by email, but then it was Banksy and any paper is always more than glad to trumpet a Banksy interview. He was asked, for instance, why he hadn’t charged for entry to the show at Bristol and made his fortune. ‘I’m an accountant’s worst nightmare. I had suggested a £20 entry with a voucher for £20 off your next purchase of any original Banksy but people didn’t think it would work out.’ After various responses in this vein, the last question he was asked was what he would paint on the wall of the Guide if he happened to break in one weekend. ‘A giant comedy cock,’ he replied, making the embarrassment that was to follow even worse.

  Three days later the Guardian apologised. The interview, ‘it transpires, was conducted with someone impersonating the graffiti artist’, and ‘we apologise to Banksy for this error and for any offence and inconvenience caused.’ In a way it was another triumph for Banksy; there was more publicity for the exhibition and he both remained anonymous and had a newspaper apologising to him for an ‘offence’ essentially created by that very anonymity. A week later the Guardian’s readers’ editor examined the case. Rich Pelley, the journalist, had sent his questions to an email address which his source had convinced him would put him in direct email contact with Banksy. Neither he nor the Guide’s editor had any doubt that the interview was genuine, particularly since it came at the time of the Bristol show when Banksy was looking for publicity. However the readers’ editor suggested that this was not enough; the Guide should have called Banksy’s ‘official spokesperson’ to verify the interview.

  It was just such a call which saved the Observer from similar embarrassment. The paper’s Music Monthly was putting together a special art and music issue. Miranda Sawyer, a writer on the paper, had been contacted by someone on Facebook who, over the course of several months, had convinced her that he was Banksy. She told Caspar Llewellyn Smith, the magazine’s editor, that she would ask Banksy for a list of his top ten favourite records – a perfect fit for the issue. ‘It seemed slightly odd,’ he says, ‘but I thought, she knows a lot of people in the art world. So it seemed plausible that Banksy would know her and I assumed that he operated under some sort of alias on Facebook.’ As the deadline drew ever closer, no list had appeared but Banksy was still promising to do it, ‘and because I’d met him a few times I thought if she’s saying “It’s for Caspar’s magazine,” he’ll do it.’

  It was as though this Banksy character was grooming Sawyer in a deeply unpleasant way. ‘He was quite friendly and had a similar sense of humour,’ she says, ‘and it gradually progressed and escalated . . . He was always quite flaky, quite hard to get hold of, all the stuff that you would imagine.’ But slowly she got to know things about him. ‘It was all kind of plausible. He kept going down to the West Country, which is obviously where Banksy is from. He was living in London on a boat on the river, which was also kind of likely. He was really, really druggy; and I thought, yeah, well maybe that’s not implausible . . . We kept nearly meeting and then not meeting. And you don’t want to push it because you think it’s Banksy.’

  ‘Banksy’ did indeed come up with his top ten, number one being the completely plausible, very right-on ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ by the late Gil Scott-Heron, and it went on from there. Not only did he provide his list, but he also provided the artwork to go with it – Michael Jackson as a sort of Madonna. By the time the list arrived the deadline had almost been and gone; but the magazine needed to check the copyright on the artwork and it was at this point that Banksy’s PR was asked for confirmation that this was the real thing. Llewellyn Smith says, ‘She immediately came back to me saying “He’s not done anything like that and he doesn’t know the journalist.”’

  But in the anonymous world of Banksy you never quite know the rules. Was Banksy pretending it was someone else when it really was him? What was really going on? So in the meantime Miranda Sawyer was desperately trying to get hold of the man she thought was Banksy to ask him for the truth. Eventually she got a text back from him simply saying ‘Hands Up.’ She says now: ‘I thought, you xxxxxx, I’ve been writing for twenty years and I nearly got completely stitched up. I had to phone the magazine and say “Pull it now.” It taught me more about the internet than it taught me about Banksy.

  ‘What’s interesting about it is the interplay of anonymity and fame. He’s completely anonymous and he’s really famous, so there’s the flattery – somebody who you think is famous gets in touch with you. Oh, that’s nice. He’s Banksy and he wants to get in touch with me. But since he can hide behind his anonymity it could actually be anyone. It’s the same with all things on the internet. I really, really felt someone was working on my goodwill. He was somebody who was quite friendly and you feel that you have let somebody in and then they are not who they say they are and you feel a bit invaded. If it had gone to print I would have just been mortified beyond belief.’

  It was a very close call; in the end the Observer made the right checks and saved everyone huge embarrassment. Nevertheless it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, this person who uses Banksy’s anonymity to get his kicks.

  The other type of fraud, impersonating not Banksy himself but his pictures, is more easily understandable. The motive is simply easy money. In the early days, it appears not to have bothered him too much. In one intervie
w he was asked if he minded being ripped off. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘The thing is, I was a bootlegger for three years so I don’t really have a leg to stand on.’ But by 2010 things had changed somewhat. On the Banksy website there appeared a ‘message from Banksy’s lawyer’ which warned of the consequences of fraud while at the same time distancing Banksy at least one step from it all: ‘As a result of complaints from members of the public several investigations are now under way by the Police and Trading Standards into incidents of fraud. These are conducted irrespective of the views of the artist and are treated extremely seriously by the authorities. Successful prosecutions may result in a custodial sentence.’

  There certainly was an investigation by the Trading Standards Office involving copyright, but it came to a halt when it was made clear that at some point the investigators would need to meet Banksy. However, the scale of the ongoing forgery meant that eventually the police had to be involved.

  From 2007 onwards all Banksy’s prints have been signed. This makes the forger’s job difficult, but still not impossible. It is the earlier prints which are the greatest problem, partly because of the lack of a signature but also because originally they were often bought for a couple of hundred pounds by buyers who simply liked Banksy and were not too interested in establishing provenance. ‘I was uber cautious,’ says Acoris Andipa. ‘You don’t have to be a rocket scientist. If someone’s holding a print that they bought for £80 and it’s now worth £2000 and then next week it’s worth £5000 and six months later it’s worth £10,000, then somebody out there is going to start copying.’

  Robin Barton of the Bankrobber Gallery tells of a seller who came to him with fourteen pieces of street art. ‘There were very convincing stories and convincing emails from people close to Banksy who would verify these pieces. There was a tile, there was a small work on plywood which was very nice. Three triangular road signs, a strip of plastic that looked as though it might have come off a bollard at some point. They all had rats on them, as I recall. There was even a spray can with Banksy written on it. It was very elaborate, he brought them in slowly over the course of a month as he tried to draw me in.

  ‘Some of it I really liked, but there were just certain things that weren’t right. I ran each piece by the people who have the largest database of Banksy artworks anywhere. They’ve got thousands of images. And they Photoshopped them, over-layered them and basically told me in every case: fake, fake, FAKE. It was always the scale that was wrong. He was a nice guy, he said he bought the whole collection from someone in Europe for something like £29,000. He was either the duped or he was the duper, and to this day I don’t know which one he was.’

  Barton managed to escape unscathed, but Keith Sekree was one of the many Banksy fans who had his fingers burnt – although in the end he got his revenge and he can laugh about it now as he tells the tale. Just turned thirty, he is a very good example of how Banksy has drawn a completely new core of people into the art world. We met on a perfect spring day close to the docks in Southampton, where he had both his office as a financial adviser and his own gallery. Since then he has ended his role as a financial adviser to concentrate full time on his gallery – the TAOI Gallery. The remarkable thing is that here is a man who had hardly ever set foot in an art gallery before he discovered Banksy, yet who now runs his own. His first interest in Banksy was sparked off not by going to an exhibition but by being pulled over for a speeding ticket. ‘I was doing like 34 mph in a 30 mph area. I got really annoyed and I was literally scanning around the internet and I found this Banksy image [Flying Copper – a policeman all gunned up but with a smiley face], and it just related to how I was feeling about the police. So I bought it and it all flowed from there.’

  He soon discovered that in those days, before the Los Angeles show, Banksy was selling for ‘a hell of a lot less’ in America than he was in the UK. He put in an offer on a Banksy original being sold on eBay – collection only – on a Wednesday. His offer was accepted but to make it his he had to collect it from New York by the Saturday. He made the deadline – just – and sold it back in England for a very healthy profit two weeks later. He was on his way. ‘If people like me could make money in art then anyone could.’

  Next he found a print of the Banksy Bomb Hugger in America. This one he wanted to keep for himself, not sell. It was a print dating from 2003, a time when the majority of Banksy’s prints were not signed and there was no proper authentication service. Nevertheless, as Keith says, ‘This was coming from a reputable seller with as much provenance as you could hope to get.’ Crucially this included the original credit card receipt from the gallery in Brighton, the start of an easily followed trail which showed that the gallery had sold it to an English buyer who then sold it on to the American. In addition the print was blind stamped. (Blind stamping is where the printer punches the paper with a stamp but no ink, leaving a permanent identifying impression on the print.) So he bought it for around £1400. ‘Everything seemed to make sense about it.’

  This was followed by Turf War – Winston Churchill with a grassy Mohican – which he was buying as a favour for one of his leading clients. He found the print by advertising on one of the Banksy forums, rather than using eBay. Again the print came with full provenance but, better than that, this time he got to see the print before he bought it and meet the seller, who was also the original purchaser. ‘He said he’d bought it from the Tate – which used to sell Banksy prints – and he had the receipt to prove it. We met and had a drink in a hotel just outside Liverpool Street station. He seemed an amenable bloke, a very nondescript guy. I did make him write out an invoice for the print and put down his name, address, signature, and he had no problem doing that.’ The seller wrote his real name – Grant Howard – and signed it. ‘He was not at all nervous, even when we were talking about what would happen to him if I found out it was fake – he was going “Oh yeah, I totally agree.”’ The cost was £1250, in cash.

  Very soon after this Keith was contacted by Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Unit, who had tracked his purchase of Bomb Hugger on eBay. The detectives asked him to bring the print in because they believed it was one of several fakes that had come on to the market. He took Bomb Hugger to Scotland Yard, and it was not long before they pronounced it a fake and told him all the supporting documents were fakes too. As a safeguard, he took Turf War to Pictures on Walls, so they could give him the full provenance for the print, establishing beyond any doubt that it was a Banksy.

  The gallery was working closely with the police and shortly afterwards came a phone call, not from the gallery but from Detective Constable Ian Lawson of the Met’s Art and Antiques Unit, saying ‘You’re never going to believe this, but unfortunately your Turf War is a fake too.’

  ‘You’re never going to believe this either,’ said Keith, ‘but I’ve just had the same man on the phone offering me more Banksys.’ The police, says Keith, ‘were beginning to realise they had a big problem. We weren’t talking about a print here and there, we were talking about hundreds of prints.’ It turned out that both Bomb Hugger and Turf War had been forged by the same South London pair, Grant Howard and Lee Parker, who were producing their own copies and claiming they were part of the limited edition print run almost as fast as Banksy was producing his own prints.

  Keith was asked to be the central character in a sting organised by Scotland Yard – the kind of operation you see in the movies. One of the last things he had said to Grant Howard was, ‘If this isn’t real, I promise you I will find out where you are and I will be very very annoyed.’ It was, as Keith says, more a South Coast threat than an East End threat, but here was his chance to get even. ‘They told me I couldn’t push him to sell me something. He had to be offering a print. They were very careful to make sure that all of their evidence was obtained in the right way.’ After two or three weeks of telephone contact he agreed with Howard on a price for another Banksy print, Laugh Now, again an early print the majority of which were unsigned. They arranged
to meet in the same bar at the same Liverpool Street station hotel.

  Was he nervous? ‘Really nervous. Scotland Yard had told me that he had no history of violence but they had gone through an emergency plan if things didn’t go as planned. They told me I didn’t need to pay much attention because things would be OK. They didn’t give me a wire or anything because they said the moment he walked in he would be arrested.

  ‘On the day I got to the bar nice and early. I’d had a quick drink first at the bar just around the corner since I didn’t particularly want the police to see me having a drink. In the hotel bar I recognised some of the people I had seen in the office at Scotland Yard sitting around casually waiting. He turned up early and he was carrying a massive art portfolio full of prints, bless him. Five or more undercover police people literally jumped on him – chairs all over the place. It was in this nice hotel and you’ve got other people having morning coffee and business meetings and suddenly this. They took him off to Charing Cross police station straight away and left me to pay the bar bill.’

  If Banksy had drawn Keith Sekree into the art market, he had drawn the two fakers in as well. Neither of them were art market insiders: Grant Howard, forty-four, was a one-time roofer from Croydon and his childhood friend Lee Parker, forty-five, from Eastbourne was a plumber who had hit hard times and was having trouble paying his mortgage. In the summer of 2010 they both pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to defraud. They were given a twelve-month sentence suspended for two years, 240 hours of community service and banned from selling anything on the internet for five years. It turned out that Howard had already been charged with previous offences and was out on bail when he was tempted to sell Keith the print at Liverpool Street station, so he spent three months in prison before the pair were sentenced for breaching his original bail conditions.