Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  They had used multiple eBay accounts and email addresses as well as the various Banksy forums on the web. Both had been genuine Banksy fans for years before they started faking him, so they knew what they were talking about, and according to the prosecution if they were seriously challenged by a buyer they tried blinding them with science. If that failed, on occasions they would actually refund the buyer their money. Once they even provided a genuine Banksy as a replacement to a buyer who had complained bitterly about the one they sold him being a fake.

  The police found the printer, who was doing a very fine job in faking Banksys. Printing them was not a criminal offence – passing them off as Banksys was. ‘Faking a Banksy is not a very difficult process but they were perfect forgeries,’ says Keith Sekree. ‘When I found out my Turf War was a forgery we took it out of the frame and weighed it and it was a quarter of a gram out compared to the genuine one. They even did a good job sourcing the paper, and sourcing the blind stamp.’ A couple of their greatest hits were Golf Sale, which went to an American for £6500, and Monkey Queen, bought by a Spaniard for £4500. Again both were from 2003, when a high percentage of a Banksy edition were unsigned. In total the police discovered 120 fakes, with an estimated value of £200,000, half still with Howard and Parker and half recovered from their victims – there may well be other victims out there who still don’t know their prints are fakes.

  When you think about it, the very idea of faking a live artist seems absurd. A dead artist is one thing: he or she is not here any more to stand up and say ‘That’s not mine.’ But a live artist? It has to be the fact that the perpetrators thought they could rely on Banksy the vandal never appearing in court to denounce them. For there were other fakers too. In Coventry Robert McGarry, aged twenty-seven, bought four ‘Banksys’ at a car boot sale for £300. He claimed to the court that he believed they were all genuine Banksy prints, but if that was the case he must have thought he had got a truly wonderful bargain. There was only one problem: he didn’t have any provenance to support his belief that they were genuine. So he simply forged certificates to authenticate them. Over a period of eight months he managed to sell all four prints, using different eBay accounts: Barcode went for £7100 to a doctor in December 2007, Girl With Balloon for £1515 in January 2008 (maybe my Girl With Balloon would be worth that if I had slightly more impressive provenance than receipts from the copy shop and John Lewis). Love Rat went for £842 in June 2008. Finally B&W Trolley Hunters fetched £1700 in August 2008. The court reports gave a dry account of all this, but some of the pain comes out on Banksyforum, where one post reads: ‘This little fucker ripped a few people off including yours truly. I was the mug who bought the Trolley Hunters.’

  McGarry admitted the four charges and got away with a 32-week sentence, suspended for two years, and 120 hours of unpaid work. The prosecution accepted his story that he believed the prints were genuine and it was this that saved him from going to prison.

  In 2007 the temptation to flog what in this case were ‘unauthorised’ Banksy prints became too much even for a few of the people working for him. The Art Newspaper reported that employees of Pictures on Walls were selling prints themselves and hiking the price up on eBay. Since the prints were not part of the limited edition, the most likely explanation for their existence was that they were part of the standard overrun – printer’s proofs or artist’s proofs or both – which come with any such edition.

  Banksy’s lawyers were indignant and very earnest, while in contrast Banksy himself adopted a completely different tone – almost as though he was enjoying it. His lawyers’ statement read in part: ‘It appears that in spite of strict fiscal controls and strict controls of the physical prints that 25 bad prints have been sold on eBay. Pictures on Walls have called on eBay to assist in tracing these sales and also in tracing the money which will inexorably lead to those that have cynically betrayed the trust of the public, the artist and the company.’

  Banksy however suggested: ‘They say it’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody, but I don’t think that applies to art prints. If it turns out that limited editions have not been limited in edition then I sincerely apologise. This is particularly unfortunate for the people who buy my work to flip it for a quick profit on eBay, as I wouldn’t want to affect their mark-up.’ It was almost as though, whatever his staff and his lawyers might say, he quite enjoyed the idea that some of the people who bought his art for a quick profit might have lost out.

  In the end Pictures on Walls said they had been ‘unable to find any evidence of a serial fraud being conducted by current or former members of staff as has been alleged. We are aware former staff have sold a number of prints via eBay, but we have found nothing to indicate these prints were issued fraudulently.’ They promised compensation for anybody who had been supplied ‘a faulty piece of art’.

  (Innocent mistakes can happen. In 2004 Heavy Weaponry – an elephant with a missile strapped to its back – sold at Bloomsbury Auctions for £25,000. It was one of Banksy’s stencils on canvas, in an edition of twenty-five, and this one was numbered 12. Twelve days later Heavy Weaponry sold at Bonhams for £32,000. It was the same painting from the same edition of twenty-five, but unfortunately it had the same edition number – 12. Embarrassingly, someone in the Banksy team had simply messed up.)

  Nevertheless things had to change, and they did. In January 2008 a new Banksy company was established, 100 per cent owned by Pictures on Walls. Pest Control Office Limited is its full name, but it is known by everyone in the street art world as Pest Control. Now, for £65 you can get your Banksy print authenticated. And just to keep the whole thing as jokey as possible, the authentication certificate has stapled to it half a ‘Di faced tenner’, a £10 note faked by Banksy with Lady Diana’s face on it. The tenner has a handwritten ID number on it which can be matched to the number on the other half of the note held by Pest Control. A fake to prove that you do indeed have the genuine article – what could be more Banksy than that?

  And as for the pests, people like me who want information or, more usually, people who have taken Banksy pieces off the streets – whether in the form of doors, shutters, bollards, traffic cones or walls – and want them authenticated as a Banksy, we all get banished into outer darkness. Hence Pest Control. The company has had a dramatic impact on cleaning up the market, but at the same time it has infuriated those who possess what are undoubtedly genuine Banksys but which Pest Control refuses to authenticate as genuine.

  Twelve

  Psst . . . Anyone Want to Buy a Wall?

  Banksy gets around, and wherever he goes he usually leaves his mark. Whereas earlier in his short career his work usually remained in place only until it was washed away by clean-up squads or tagged out of existence by other graffiti writers, now there is a third option: Banksy has become so valuable that it can be worth taking the wall down and selling it – a real piece of street art in your own home or office.

  Every Banksy wall tells a different story. So I made a list of his walls and other such surfaces which have been sold, are up for sale, or have disappeared and are likely to appear on the market one day. Although this list is certainly incomplete, it gives some idea of what Banksy sees as a problem, and the wall’s owners see as a good way to make a pile of money from a piece of graffiti that is – sometimes literally – on their doorstep.

  There is a rat declaring, ‘I’M OUT OF BED AND DRESSED – WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?’ painted on the outside of a building in Los Angeles at the time of his exhibition there – Banksy’s film gives a fascinating glimpse of him cutting out the stencils for it and then putting it up. There is a water tank, also in Los Angeles, painted when he was looking for publicity days before the 2011 Oscar ceremony; there are the two pieces from a Yorkshire farm produced when Banksy was creating the artwork for Blur’s Observer Music Monthly cover: part of the farmer’s gate (sold) and a section of the wall of a cattle barn (unsold). There are two snogging policemen somehow taken off the wall of a pub i
n Brighton and replaced by a copy. There is a mural of four pensioners all hooded up with a boom box and a zimmer frame, peeled off a wall in Clerkenwell, London. There are three walls from Bethlehem: the Israeli soldier demanding a donkey’s identity papers, a pigtailed young girl dressed in pink frisking an Israeli soldier and a wet dog shaking itself dry.

  There is a punk having trouble with a self-assembly pack marked IEAK, close enough to the IKEA store in Croydon for the connection to be very obvious; there is the steel side of a newsagent’s stall in Tottenham Court Road, London, and a piece of marine ply hoarding from a building site in Liverpool. There is a Banksy boy on a wall salvaged from Islington, north London before the building was knocked down for redevelopment (it was close to a piece by the New York artists Faile – who command a price in the same region as Banksy – which at one point was being offered ‘free’ with the Banksy). There is a wall in the midst of disintegrating Detroit which was painted to publicise the opening of his film. There is an advertising billboard in Los Angeles, painted like the rat in the run-up to the Oscars, which Banksy altered by inserting a frisky Mickey Mouse groping the billboard’s original barely clad model. On the web you can see two men come close to a fight as they battle for ownership of the billboard. Two further wall pieces in LA, also from his Oscar campaign, were swiftly cut out and should appear on the market at some point. Another website has a film of a Banksy wall being cut down in Jamaica; a lot of drink appears to have been consumed and it is a miracle that neither the wall nor its handlers were injured. So the Banksy wall industry is showing reasonable growth, and very occasionally amidst all the hype a wall actually gets sold.

  Entertainingly, the Los Angeles Times’s architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne compared the selling of these Banksy walls to the auctioning of some of the furniture and other bits and pieces from Chandigarh, the extraordinary city 180 miles north of Delhi that Le Corbusier designed in the 1950s. For example a Corbusier-designed manhole cover has been auctioned for almost $20,000 and a concrete light fixture from the city’s zoo fetched $36,000.

  Hawthorne acknowledged that in Banksy’s case, where the American pieces nearly all appeared at around the time Exit Through the Gift Shop was released or during the run-up to the Oscars, it is ‘nearly impossible to tell where the art-making ends and the marketing begins’. But then he elevated the argument on to a different plane, far away from Banksy’s casual beginnings: ‘A broader and frankly more compelling issue is how these two stories turn inside out the relationship between patrimony and exploitation, and between local heritage and colonial privilege. It is one thing when occupying British forces forcibly remove an artwork from its setting, as they did two centuries ago with the Elgin Marbles, and ship it out of the country. It is something else entirely when the pieces at risk were created by outsiders, and locals are the ones rushing to loot as well as protect them.’

  When architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Henry Greene designed private homes, Hawthorne said, they often designed not only the building but also ‘furniture, fixtures, carpets and other interior elements meant to be inseparable from their architectural containers. Pieces from such houses now fill the collections of museums around the world.’

  Dismantling such ‘architectural masterworks’, however upsetting, at least took them from the ‘private, moneyed domestic realm to the public sphere of the museum gallery’. But the journeys of Banksy and Le Corbusier illustrate ‘a trip in the opposite direction, from visible to inaccessible, from public to salable’.

  So there you have it. If you want to sell the Banksy equivalent of the Elgin Marbles, you are in for a tough time both from the artist and some critics. In England the man to go to if you want to buy or sell a wall is Robin Barton. He ran the Bankrobber gallery in Notting Hill until the spring of 2011, when he closed it and went off to the Hamptons outside New York to curate a whole exhibition devoted to Banksy walls. When I visited the Notting Hill gallery there was a calculated whiff of the outsider – the bank-robber – about the place, reflected by the first painting that hit you as you walked in the door: a painting of Kate Moss costing £7000 called Love, completed by her former boyfriend Pete Doherty, whom Bankrobber represents, shortly after their break-up. If I had had about £9000 to spare I could have bought another piece by Doherty called Needle. ‘Pete did this when he was going out with Kate Moss and he was completely off his face. He came in here, grabbed a canvas, pulled some of his own blood – all in front of some appalled German students – and then started sketching with it. It’s not high art but if you are at all turned on by that moment of time and excesses it will appeal to you.’ There were, too, some pieces by Ronald Kray, which were for inspection rather than for sale: ‘They are not high art in any shape or form and I wouldn’t pretend they are, I collect them for fun.’ Amongst all this the Hirst spot print, several Banksys on the wall, a Warhol Campbell’s soup print on the floor beside Banksy’s Tesco tomato soup – ‘I hope to sell them as a pair to someone with money who wants to be ironic’ – all seemed positively conservative.

  Barton is probably Banksy’s least favourite dealer, a man who operates pretty much outside his control and who takes a positive joy in irritating him. Like the other dealers in this world of urban art whom I met he exists outside the Bond Street comfort zone. He has a Union Jack ring on one finger and one of his daughter’s teeth set in a silver ring on another. In his reflecting sunglasses, there is about him the air of the jokey, sharp outsider, which he needs to survive. He started out as a photographer specialising in the sort of grainy black and white pictures that the Independent magazine once specialised in – plenty of kudos but not much money. So he abandoned taking pictures and started selling them. He opened his Notting Hill gallery in May 2006. The idea was that it would be a photography gallery, but then he, like others who were drawn into the art world, ‘just chanced upon Banksy’ and realised he had stumbled on a gold mine.

  The first ever Banksy exhibition in New York, at the Vanina Holasek gallery in December 2007, was billed as ‘Banksy does New York’. Complete with T-shirts on sale for $50 each and white walls hung with Banksys in a deliberately topsy-turvy style, it was actually nothing to do with Banksy. True, all sixty or so exhibits were Banksys – but they were collected and curated largely by Barton, who had seen what was happening to the market in England and wanted to reach New York before anyone else did. Banksy’s website said the exhibition was ‘unlikely to be worth visiting’ and emphasised without any apparent sense of irony that it was ‘completely unauthorised’. The critics did not like it much either, and on the Banksy forums fans were outraged. The gallery was heaving every day, but the crowds had come to look not buy. Barely anything sold; however, just by putting on the show Barton had demonstrated that he could operate outside the artist’s control and it gave him the publicity he needed.

  So it seems only natural that if anyone is going to sell street pieces – legally obtained, he likes to emphasise – it is going to be Barton. He says, ‘It’s a sort of poisoned chalice, because these pieces can sit around for a very long time taking up a lot of space and causing a lot of grief. But in the end the good stuff does sell.’ His argument is that if he does sell a wall – and he has sold a couple – he makes a good deal of money out of it; but more than that, he says he’s doing it ‘for the fun of it’. ‘He pissed me off basically with his attitude. How bonkers the whole thing is. He thinks he’s Robin Hood but he ain’t.’

  At my last count, seven walls are or have been on his books; two of these, the Liverpool marine ply hoarding and the steel section of a newsagent’s stall from Tottenham Court Road, had been sold and five were still waiting for a buyer. ‘The reason walls are so very hard to sell is that you are actually asking someone to give you half a million pounds for a bunch of old rubble with some stencil work on it which they probably will never be able to offload again. And there aren’t many people who like spending that kind of money.’

  The first work he sold w
as a lovely piece: a stencilled boy, clutching a dripping paintbrush in both hands, who has just painted ‘WHAT?’ in giant pink letters on the wall behind him. Instead of looking triumphant he looks rather sad, as though he does not know the answer to his question and no one else does either.

  It sold faster than any other piece, but like most of these walls it has an involved back story. In May 2006 it was painted on the rear of a street stall on Tottenham Court Road on quarter-inch steel. Once cut out it measured 2.2 metres square. The stall was owned by one Sam Khan, who for thirty years traded in luggage and football scarves and other tourist essentials. He sold this section of his stall for £1000, which for a very short time sounded like a lot of money, but he soon discovered he had made a disastrous mistake. His story, as he told it to the Evening Standard, went: ‘I don’t know anything about art. I’ve been on the stall all my life trying to make an honest living come rain or snow. I’ve had people coming up to me saying, “How did you not know who Banksy is?” and, “Why didn’t you go on the internet?” I get up at 5 a.m. and I’m on the stall for twelve hours a day. I don’t follow these things.

  ‘The guy who bought it from me came with £1000 cash and intimidated me into it. I was threatened when I asked for time to think and I had to deliver it to a storage depot in King’s Cross. I’ve never been able to find that man again.’ He said he paid £300 to have the steel panel removed and £300 for a replacement panel, leaving him with a profit of £400.

  ‘I have no sympathy for him,’ says Barton. ‘He shot himself in the foot. I had nothing to do with the purchasing of the piece. All I did was display it in Bankrobber and it sold pretty much the day it went up.’ He was helped by the fact that it had been featured in a paperback edition of Wall and Piece, the edition which had come out promising ‘Now with 10 per cent more crap’, so there was no doubt that it was a genuine Banksy. In addition, it was ‘right in the middle of all the Banksy hysteria and it had press coverage, which always helps sell something like that because it gives it validation.’ The Evening Standard suggested he might be asking as much as £500,000 for this old chunk of street vendor’s stall. But he says, ‘I had no intention of asking that, I had no idea what to ask really.’ Like most dealers he is coy about what he got for it, but the word was that it was more like £230,000 than £500,000. Whatever the final price, Barton is convinced he sold it cheap: ‘The guy who bought it went off skiing and by the time he came back, in my view it would have been worth twice as much.’ He is equally coy about the buyer, but sources suggest it was bought for Matthew Freud, Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law although he has never confirmed this.