Banksy

by Will Ellsworth-Jones

  ‘This is where we started to learn more about the whole Banksy operation – like it’s almost a conspiracy, because it’s more of a business than it is about the art at the end of the day. If it was about the art, then why is it that a collector that truly loves art wouldn’t look at this piece and say that’s a piece of art no matter what anybody else says?’ She is ‘frustrated’ with collectors who have ‘lost their independence’, and she is disappointed with Banksy because ‘it’s probably all about the business and not even about the art any more.’ It has to be said, though, that their capture of the elephant was just as much about business as it was about art. Tavia explained that the cost of storing the tank in a warehouse meant that it would soon have to be scrapped and that would be ‘super-sad’. Indeed in December 2011 she told me that they had eventually been forced to scrap the tank – the ‘magic of the elephant remains a lost mystery’.

  Inevitably Stephan Keszler’s attempt to sell Banksy’s wall at the summer exhibition in the Hamptons saw Pest Control in attack mode once again. They issued a statement saying: ‘We have warned Mr Keszler of the serious implications of selling unauthenticated works but he seems not to care. We have no doubt that these works will come back to haunt Mr Keszler.’ Although both Keszler and Barton say they never received such an ‘admonishment’, the effect was the same: none of the pieces sold.

  Yet however much Pest Control might complain, the point is that while these walls are ‘unauthenticated’ they are still Banksy’s work – no one has faked them. He is now in a unique position. His straightforward prints and canvases are signed by him and authenticated by Pest Control. But in addition there are the street pieces, which nowadays are usually announced on his website and in the past were sometimes found in his book. Because he does not want these pieces to be removed, Pest Control will not authenticate them. So they are Banksy works which are acknowledged in some way by him but not authenticated. Perhaps a new secondary market will eventually emerge dealing in authentic Banksys which nonetheless lack one key piece of paper.

  Pest Control has strong echoes of the Authentication Board set up by the Warhol Foundation eight years after his death, and which stamps in ink DENIED on the back of any canvas it does not consider authentic, just to emphasise the point. By 2011, however, the Foundation decided it was spending too much money and time defending itself in the courts from lawsuits filed by those who considered their Warhol authentic despite being DENIED. So it shocked the art world by announcing that the Authentication Board would be closed down in the spring of 2012. In future, it appears, the market – helped by experts – will have to decide which is a genuine Warhol. Pest Control managed to establish almost the same level of control within eight months rather than eight years and so far they have not had to deal with any lawsuits. It is a measure of how successful Pest Control has been that Robin Barton says it would be ‘the kiss of death’ if he tried to apply for authentication. There are others who were wary of being interviewed because they feared that if, in the future, they were to apply for authentication of one of the pieces they owned they would be rejected.

  So Banksy had got rid of Steve Lazarides and sorted out his team. He had established his organisation as the only one whose word dealers would accept on whether a Banksy was real or not. The price of his pictures was not spiralling upwards in the same way it had in 2007 and 2008, but it was steady. What he needed now was a new challenge.

  Fourteen

  Bonjour Monsieur Brainwash

  In May 2010, Lot 437, Charlie Chaplin Pink, went up for sale at Phillips de Pury in New York. It featured a sort of Charlie Chaplin figure holding a can of pink paint, in front of a background of Marilyn Monroe faces with a couple of Campbell’s soup cans thrown in for good measure. It was described by Vandalog in his blog as ‘ugliness overload’, but despite this it reached double the estimate: $122,500. In October the same sort of painting was put up for auction in London – although this time it featured Einstein, who was awkwardly holding a placard reading ‘LOVE IS THE ANSWER’ in front of a similar background. Not only was it signed by the artist but it was ‘marked by the artist’s blood on the reverse’. This went for £75,000.

  Both works were by Mr Brainwash, or MBW for short, and they were being sold at a time when some collectors seriously believed that Mr Brainwash might somehow be Banksy in disguise. Since then, with the dawning of reality, these prices – apart from one auction result in France where a mixture of icons, Monroe, Mickey and Minnie Mouse and JFK fetched $82,107 – have not come anywhere near being matched. Nevertheless such prices remain an amazing triumph of marketing. For Mr Brainwash is entirely a Banksy construct. Street art without Banksy would still exist, but Mr Brainwash without Banksy would never have arrived and never have survived.

  The easiest way to grasp the identity of Mr Brainwash is to watch Banksy’s Oscar-nominated film Exit Through the Gift Shop, now available on DVD. A brief outline goes something like this: Thierry Guetta, a Frenchman living in Los Angeles, picks up a camera and films graffiti artists – endlessly. He’s a friendly guy and a persistent one too, so he makes it up through the ranks of the street artist hierarchy, filming them all until only Banksy is left. When Banksy arrives in Los Angeles to start the preliminary work on his show there, he needs a gofer. Through Shepard Fairey he finds Guetta, who soon talks Banksy into allowing himself to be filmed and indeed, for a time at least, becomes a friend.

  When, later, Guetta shows Banksy his ninety-minute street art film, Banksy realises it is unwatchable – ‘someone maybe with mental problems who happened to have a camera.’ So he suggests that Thierry himself try his hand at street art – ‘Have a little show. Invite a few people, get some bottles of wine’ – and in turn Banksy will gain possession of all the tapes and use them to make a film about street art. Guetta, now known as Mr Brainwash, turns his ‘little show’ into a mega-exhibition entitled Life is Beautiful and every move he makes is filmed by Banksy’s crew.

  With testimonials of a sort from Fairey and Banksy, free prints for the first 200 people into the exhibition and a cover story in LA Weekly, the queue for the show stretched along three Hollywood blocks. The five-day opening was extended to two months, sales were astonishing and Guetta jumped from zero to hero. He had much more than his allotted fifteen minutes of fame and Banksy had a movie. It is a very clever, funny movie about the making and marketing of art, but it is also slightly depressing because Mr Brainwash – for a time at least – is so successful in brainwashing fans into believing that his hype is actually art. Prankumentary, mockumentary, docu-parody are just some of the ways critics suggest it might best be described; nevertheless it squeezes into the Documentary category for the Academy Awards, reaches the shortlist and narrowly misses an Oscar.

  Banksy was undoubtedly the creative force that drove Mr Brainwash and thus the film forward; but the role he chose to play during his intermittent appearances in front of the camera was that of the naïf artist who did not quite know what he had let himself in for. Slouched in a chair, fully hooded up and with his voice distorted, it is only his hands and particularly his fat fingers that guarantee that it is Banksy we are looking at. He tells us that Thierry ‘was actually a lot more interesting than I am’ (unfortunately not); that ‘we all needed someone who knew how to use a camera’ (he picked the wrong man); that ‘maybe I needed to trust somebody . . . I guess he became my friend’ (sort of).

  When Exit Through the Gift Shop first came out, critics very understandably appeared a little nervous. On the whole they liked the film but they were not entirely sure whether or not they were being conned rotten. A year after its first release the Los Angeles Times was still remarking: ‘The uncomfortable question persists: is it real?’ Was this ridiculous bumbler speaking English with an unbelievable French accent too good to be true, or was he perhaps Ali G having a laugh, or maybe even Banksy himself in disguise? Anthony Lane in the New Yorker was one of the few critics who did not like the film, calling it ‘overstretched
’ and suggesting it ‘feels dangerously close to the promotion of a cult – almost, dare one say it, of a brand’.

  But for the most part critics enjoyed it. David Gritten in the Daily Telegraph called it an ‘amusing curious documentary’. However, he admitted that he left the film ‘not knowing quite what to think . . . Who actually made the film? What’s true? What’s not? Is it a Banksy stunt satirising the art world?’ In the Evening Standard Nick Curtis neatly covered his bets: ‘If art-prankster Banksy’s first film is a hoax, as it just might be, it’s an extremely complex and clever one.’ The New York Times compared it to Banksy’s best work: ‘a trompe l’oeil: a film that looks like a documentary but feels like a monumental con’; and in Vanity Fair Julian Sancton wrote, ‘It would actually make less sense if he put out a movie that wasn’t in some way pulling a fast one on the audience.’

  Banksy on the other hand, in the run-up to the Oscars, was having none of this. He told A.J. Schnack, whose website All These Wonderful Things specialises in documentary film, ‘Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind if people believe me or not, but the film’s power comes from the fact it’s all 100% true.’ Well, up to a point . . .

  It needs to be said first that despite the critics’ worries, Thierry Guetta is for real, mutton-chop whiskers and all. He is not Ali G, he is not Banksy, he is a man who has miraculously landed on his feet and is enjoying every minute of it. His life before Banksy was that of a member of a comfortable French immigrant family in Los Angeles. Shortly before the Oscars the Los Angeles Times decided to make some background checks and Thierry, perhaps advised by the Banksy team, gave his first extended interview. His parents, Tunisian Jews, had fled to France to avoid persecution and he was born in a suburb north of Paris. He lost his mother when he was eleven and his father took the five children to Los Angeles when Thierry was fifteen.

  In Los Angeles he dropped out of high school – being unable to speak English did not help – and ended up working in a vintage clothing store and then, as Exit suggests, owning and running the store. So he was just a shop owner who got lucky? Well again, not quite. The Guetta brothers’ shop was called World of Vintage T-Shirts, ‘Hollywood’s top source of Vintage T’s for over a decade’. His brothers Patrick and Marc had a book published by Taschen in 2010 on the same subject, its almost 400 pages depicting 650 T-shirts for the enjoyment of dedicated T-shirt fans. In his foreword to the book Patrick writes, ‘My brothers, Marc (aka Tony), Thierry and I started an apparel company in 1987 called Too Cute which manufactured high-end embroidered T-shirts, licensing characters from Disney and Warner Bros to the Beatles and Betty Boop. We also developed our own characters the Junglenuts.’

  The three brothers also founded TMP Enterprises – the initials of their Christian names – which is both a clothing company and a real estate company. Shepard Fairey says Thierry ‘owns a lot of property around Hollywood’ and according to one of his tenants, writing on the web, he was no more organised as a landlord than he was as a cameraman: ‘He’d bought our house in North Hollywood and made it “look” beautiful, with polished concrete floors, vintage lighting fixtures. BUT, nothing in the house worked. The appliances were constantly breaking. The roof leaked . . .’

  But whatever his abilities as a property owner, there is something rather more substantial to Thierry’s background than Exit might suggest. Indeed, according to the successful street artist Ron English, he actually came from a wealthy French family who bought up property in Los Angeles to help them in their efforts to obtain permanent residency in the States. Part of Thierry’s attraction for street artists was that he could provide ‘legal’ walls for them to paint on – for he, or his family, actually owned the buildings concerned.

  However, the film’s image of Thierry trekking around Los Angeles, sticking his camera up everyone’s nose in the most unselfconscious way possible, rings absolutely true. Sean Bonner now writes for the website boingboing.net, but in 2005 he ran a gallery with his ex-wife Caryn called sixspace in Los Angeles and was putting on a show by the French street artist Invader (who, with awesome determination, for ten years now has been gluing on to walls around the world mosaic tiles depicting the characters from the old video game Space Invaders). Invader happened to be Thierry’s cousin and his passport into the world of street art. Thierry was happy to drive his cousin wherever he needed to go, but with Thierry came his camera: ‘He always had a camera and he was always sticking it into people’s faces,’ Sean says now. Through Invader Thierry got to know Shepard Fairey and then, through the force of his own personality, drove out a rival, persuading Shepard that he was the film-maker best able to make a documentary about him.

  I had read one description of Thierry as ‘klutzy’ and ‘bumbling’, and another describing him as a force of nature. So how did Sean see him? ‘I would lean more to the fumbling and klutzy. He always seemed like he was walking around and bumping into things. I would think maybe he’s rude, maybe he’s dumb, maybe he’s whatever, but I would be talking to people and he would walk up and stick the camera in between people’s faces, people who were talking to each other who couldn’t see each other because he would stick a camera in front of them. So I don’t think he had much comprehension of the world around him. He was like bouncing through it in a lot of ways. He was hanging around with Shepard a lot and on some nights I would go out bombing with Shepard and he would tag along . . . Things worked much smoother when he wasn’t around.’

  What about the accent? ‘It’s for real, definitely for real.’

  And what about his film-making? At one point, when a Shepard Fairey exhibition was being held in sixspace, Thierry set up a stop-motion camera that took one frame about every thirty seconds. ‘It would go click and then thirty seconds later click again. He filmed everything: spreading out Shepard’s work, putting it up, the opening reception, taking it down afterwards.’ But no one ever saw it. ‘I kept asking him for it, like “Hey, can we get that video of the stop motion thing?” And he’d say “Oh, I haven’t had a chance to go through it yet.” I’d say, “It’s not really editing, it’s simply start to finish, just give us the tape and we’ll put it up.” And he was like “I haven’t had a chance.” So after about a year of asking for that I just stopped asking. I realised I was never, ever going to see it.’

  During all this time, he says, Thierry ‘had no aspirations as an artist’. They bumped into each other once more before the Brainwash show. ‘He told me that he was going to put on an art show and that he had gotten a really huge space in Hollywood and maybe he was going to ask me to help out with some part of it. And I said “Whatever it is, get in touch.” I assumed it was an art show of other people’s work. I thought he was going to open a gallery.’ Little did he know how far and how fast Mr Brainwash had come. And no, he never went to the show.

  Bonner is actually rather more polite than others. One source who worked with Thierry on the West Coast says, ‘He was in everybody’s way and in everybody’s face. You just wanted to slap him really. He was so rude, the rudest most obnoxious French guy you could ever imagine. The worst . . .’

  But if any more evidence is needed that Thierry is really Thierry and he really did have serious ambitions to make a documentary, then it comes from Alex Jablonski, a young film-maker who, in 2008, was just finishing the graduate film programme at UCLA. He got a phone call from a friend asking if he could help out logging and sorting what his friend said was ‘tons and tons of unbelievable footage of Shepard bombing various cities, all shot by a crazy Frenchman named Thierry’. This was for a different documentary on Shepard Fairey’s rise from unknown street artist to the man whose inspirational ‘Hope’ image became a part of Barack Obama’s successful bid for the presidency. He was given all the film that Thierry had shot (at least he thought it was all the film, but when he came to watch Exit he discovered that Banksy had taken some of the best bits). In need of the money, he took the job, and he says, ‘It was like every day you knew you were going to be locked in a room with a ma
dman for eight hours.’

  He had over 100 tapes to go through and there was no ‘rhyme or reason’ in how they came to him: ‘The only markings might be something like “tape 71 New York, tape 72 Las Vegas”.’ On his website thesparrowsongs.com he explained the problem:

  Thierry shot everything. Everything. The camera never stopped rolling and the tapes were in no discernable order or grouping. The logs ended up looking something like this:

  TAPE 64

  1

  Shepard in hardware store. (6 mins).

  2

  Shepard walking down street (3 mins).

  3

  Camera left rolling on table while people eat dinner (42 mins).

  TAPE 65

  1

  Camera still left rolling on table while people finish dinner (33 mins).

  2

  Camera blocked by dessert tray (6 mins).

  3

  Walking down street in New York (12mins).

  4

  Thierry talks to woman (5 mins).

  5

  Shepard pastes New York water tower (20 seconds).

  6

  Thierry getting lost near Holland Tunnel (15 mins)

  . . . and so on.