Banksy (22 page)

For those who could afford a Banksy original and wanted to see the canvas on a wall in an exhibition, then Lazarides the showman was on hand, for as Jude Law once said,
‘Steve is a bit of an event himself.’ Turf War in 2003, followed by Crude Oils in 2005 and then Barely Legal in Los Angeles in 2006 and Bristol (without Lazarides) in 2009, were all
very different shows but they had key elements in common: they were free; they were never publicised in the usual way, the secrecy adding to the allure; there were no white walls; and they were fun
– the only thing that was intimidating was the queue to get in.

And for those who wanted a gallery to come to, rather than having to brave rats and pigs and elephants and crowds at the Banksy events, Lazarides opened his own gallery in Soho in early 2006 (he
now has two more: one, much bigger, in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia and a second in Newcastle run by Steve Parkin, who left Banksy at the same time Lazarides did). True, there are no white walls, but
there is no getting away from the fact that the two London galleries are pretty straightforward, however hard Lazarides attempts to add a little edginess to emphasise that he is still one step
removed from the system. He talks about his gallery in Soho having previously been a former sex shop for spanking enthusiasts which came complete with a dungeon, while he says his Fitzrovia
gallery, in a five-floor townhouse, used to be a former brothel. In the same way, when he gave a show in New York he was almost proud of the fact that the former kitchen warehouse where he opened
the exhibition used to ‘have a lot of rat shit all over the floors’. However, his gallery in Rathbone Place now comes with a studio on the top floor occupied not by an artist but by one
Johnnie Sapong – according to
Esquire
‘a star in the hairdressing firmament’ – who counts among his customers Bryan Ferry, Jude
Law, Orlando
Bloom and Justin Timberlake and charges £420 for a consultation. Edge is everything.

And in addition to the web, the shows or Lazarides’ galleries, there were always the London auction houses. While Banksy himself never sold to the big auction houses – that would be
a step too far for his followers – he did sell to Lazarides (£837,000 worth of paintings recorded in the company accounts in the years 2007 and 2008). What Lazarides did with them is
unclear but the belief in the art world is that some of those paintings ended up with the auction houses.

What Banksy and Lazarides had done together was to create a market for street art where none had existed before. And it paid handsomely: ‘We had a spectacular year in 2007 when we took
three times the amount of money we took in any other year, but the market took a battering after that,’ says Lazarides. And while it will do nothing to change the mind of artists who accuse
him of being a sell-out, the fact is that without Banksy there might be a street art movement but there would not be a street art market.

When Lazarides left Banksy in late 2008 he sold his eighteen shares back to Pictures on Walls for a total of £70,000. (Parkin sold his shares back for £40,000.) It was good money,
but he had lost much more than that – the artist who was capable of making more money for him than any other he will ever represent. There was no doubt Banksy would survive without Lazarides,
but how would Lazarides survive without Banksy? The answer is, surprisingly well up to now. ‘Everything I’ve done so far, all the expansion, has really happened in the recession. We
only really started to find some sort of momentum in 2007 just before the rug was pulled . . . I’m immensely proud of the fact that the business is still going in 2011 when all we’ve
done is reinvest every single penny we’ve made into expanding the business.’

Century published his book
Outsiders
, claiming to cover both artists who work on the streets and those who have ‘made their name without taking the
traditional path’. Despite the book’s all-encompassing if slightly ludicrous subtitle, ‘Art By People’, there is no Banksy in the book, and Lazarides suggested that Banksy
‘is a once-in-a-generation artist, if we had put even one image of his in the book it would have become all about him.’ He might well be right, but the book was published almost a year
after their breakup, so there is almost certainly more to Banksy’s exclusion than simple artistic judgement. In addition Lazarides has published about fifteen books himself, either on the
various artists he represents or on some of his shows.
Hell’s Half Acre
, for instance, was the record of an extraordinary show he put on in conjunction with the Old Vic in October 2010
in the gloomy underground tunnels next to Leake Street. This was just about as far away from white walls as you could imagine, turning Dante’s
Inferno
into a darkly lit
exhibition-experience with everything from an armada of forty beautiful model ships suspended from the ceiling to wriggling maggots, a globe pierced with hypodermic syringes, Bernie Madoff (the
fraudster now serving a 150-year prison sentence) carved out of plaster and an incredibly irritating loud dog bark that met you at the door to hell and would not go away.

He continues to attack the American market with flamboyance, organising huge shows in New York and Los Angeles. So he is still successful without Banksy, but it is a harder and perhaps riskier
job than before. The art he sells remains very different and often exciting; nevertheless it all seems quite far removed from the street. A fellow gallery owner suggests: ‘The initial thing
was the whole Santa’s Ghetto model – find a really destroyed space and put some artwork up. Now I think it’s more about finding a space
that looks money and
then it’s easier to get people with £40,000 to spend on artwork in there. So it’s kind of going along with the established ways of selling artwork.’

But if Lazarides has shown what a classy gallery owner he is even without Banksy, what of Banksy without Lazarides? There is now no public face of Team Banksy as there was in Lazarides’
day. But behind the scenes Holly Cushing, who changed horses from Lazarides with a couple of other staff, is now the power in Banksyland. One insider says she is so powerful ‘she
is
Banksy.’ Back in 1995, when she was working in California, she was listed as a ‘production office assistant’ for Sean Penn’s film
The Crossing Guard
. So when
Lazarides was preparing for Banksy’s Barely Legal in Los Angeles, he asked Cushing to round up Brangelina and other celebrities to come to the show. She did the job incredibly well. Joel
Unangst, who watched her at work, says: ‘Out of all the people involved in the whole thing she came out on top and it’s not surprising to me at all. She’s a lovely woman and very
attractive, but hard as nails at the same time. She knows about power and money and celebrity and she knows how to run with that crowd – she just thrives in that world. But she takes no
prisoners.’ Back in England she worked for the Lazarides gallery until the break-up, helping in particular with special sales. She keeps a low profile, never giving interviews, and is no
competition to Banksy in the way Lazarides was perceived to be, but she is now the nearest anyone gets to being his manager. One measure of her success is the way she has risen to the top of the
film credits. No longer is she Sean Penn’s ‘production office assistant’; instead, for
Exit Through the Gift Shop
she is Banksy’s ‘Executive
Producer’.

I confess I have never met Holly, but I have heard quite a bit
about her. Opinions range from Acoris Andipa’s – ‘She seems to be a very professional,
balanced individual’ – to that of a gallery owner who says ‘she wants to control everything’. Another source suggests ‘she is the direct line to the big man.’
All in all, it sounds as though she is doing the job required of her.

People might not hear much of Holly but she is a sight to see. One influential member of the contemporary art world met her for the first time in Tate Modern’s café: ‘I had no
idea what she looked like but when she came through the entrance to the café I knew instantly it had to be her.’ She favours bleach blonde hair and likes wearing bright pink or bright
red, or occasionally yellow. ‘You are not going to miss her,’ confirms Acoris Andipa, ‘but why not – after all, we are in the art game and you can be whoever you want to be.
She’s dynamic and I think she genuinely has the best interest of Banksy within her. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of her, for sure.’

A source closer to Banksy says she is a ‘hard woman, tough, mercurial, and a very good buffer protecting him. She blows hot and cold depending on what day of the week it is. But she more
or less runs the business side of things and in a way she’s the perfect person to represent him. As for a gallery or representation, he is in such a strong position he doesn’t need
one.’ However, there are many things that go with promoting an edgy but now quite expensive outsider like Banksy besides simply selling a painting. Like any other primary dealer, Lazarides
was there to keep the clients happy, to promote the long-term relationship and to nurse Banksy’s prices up from one level to the next so he could reassure collectors that their money was
safe. Banksy has changed so much in the art market, but it will take time to see if he can dispense with a Lazarides type of figure and still remain as successful.

If you ever get beyond Holly Cushing the gatekeeper, what lies
the other side of the gate? Is Banksy just Banksy or does he, like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi
Murakami, leave much of the hard work and, in his case, the illegal street work to assistants? Or would that be a step too far for a street artist? Both Hirst and Koons have employed up to 100
assistants in their time. Some of Murakami’s assistants, with his encouragement, have become artists in their own right. Hirst said that he got bored after his first five spot paintings
– ‘I couldn’t be fucking arsed doing it’ – and employed assistants to do the rest. This practice has become so widely accepted that it is only the fact that he is
paying his assistants comparatively little when he makes so much that raises the odd eyebrow. But for Banksy the possibility of having one assistant, let alone 100, raises yet more accusations of
‘sell-out’ on the web.

One of his outer circle describes how it all works: ‘If you are in the team it’s not like you are there nine to five every day of the week, but he can call on the team when needed
– like the Bristol show, where you can see differences in the work. It has to be a team for the amount of work that is produced, but he is the conductor. He’s not like Damien Hirst
where people are doing everything. He is very much involved.’

His erstwhile printer Ben Eine makes much the same point. ‘He’s one person. Although now he’s so big, he’s a brand. So he has people working for him, especially when he
makes big sculptures. But he still makes all his own paintings and cuts his own stencils.’

There are some pieces which he must contract out although, importantly, the creative idea remains his. Banksy might be a very good stencil artist but that does not make him a good sculptor or a
good producer of animatronics. Take for example the Banksy bronze rat, as endearing a rat as you will ever see. He stands about
a foot high with a pack on his back and a
baseball cap worn back to front, and he is wielding a paintbrush instead of a rifle. Sculpted in bronze and first seen in the exhibition in Los Angeles, later he popped up again hiding among the
exhibits at Bristol Museum.

This was a work where the inspiration came from Banksy but the key sculpting was done by one Charlie Becker, a successful New York sculptor – now resident in Los Angeles – who has
done work for everyone from Faile to Nike. Back in 2007 he posted a slightly amazed message on his website: ‘A little while ago I got the honor of seeing a piece that I helped bring to life
(for another artist) get sold like real art gets sold. At Sothebys, alongside Warhol, Basquiat, Damien Hirst and lots more. For a grip of cash too. Man, I need to get that catalog, gives me
something to aspire to.’

This was in the days when Banksy, and many others too, were bringing in funny money. The bronze rat, one of an edition of twelve, signed and dated by the artist on the underside, made
£68,400 at Sotheby’s. Slightly less than a year later it went on sale at Sotheby’s in New York and this time the final bid was $169,000. In London in 2011 a unique version with
acrylic paint on the brush made £163,250. So yes, it was a ‘real grip of cash’.

Becker also had on his website a photograph of Banksy’s homeless Venus, which first appeared in the Barely Legal show in Los Angeles and re-emerged in Bristol, although by this time she
had acquired the sort of dog that often accompanies beggars. Since most of the other Banksy sculptures are in this style, the assumption has to be that Charlie Becker has been Banksy’s
favourite sculptor. As for the Pet Store animatronics that first appeared in New York in 2008 and reappeared in Bristol, they had to be made by model-makers of Hollywood standard. Hot dogs
having sex, a rabbit polishing her nails – the skills to create these pieces could not be acquired overnight, even though Banksy was very much the inspiration, the
creator of this wonderfully weird pet shop.

Kate Brindley, who witnessed the Banksy team at work as they put together the exhibition at Bristol, says: ‘What working with Banksy means is working with a team of people who represent or
are Banksy. Yes, I am sure there is an individual, but there is a whole lot of people who work with him to deliver on whatever his passion is. So whether the work is made in collaboration with them
or whether it is all his idea frankly doesn’t bother me greatly. It might be all his idea but I’d be surprised, because actually most things are a team effort, aren’t they? Given
the scale of what happened and what was produced, obviously he commissioned stuff, because it’s not all him making everything. But then that’s artists’ practice throughout the
ages. That’s nothing new. Artists commission work and it’s theirs, they author it – as in the Renaissance, they had schools of assistants.’

But what happens when Banksy hits the street? Are those all his pieces? The answer is that in a great majority of cases they are – but not always. There is at least one example of him
paying signwriters to do his work for him – and he was open in saying what he had done. At the time of his Pet Store show in New York in 2008, four huge rats went up in the SoHo district of
New York. Bloggers were excited: was it actually Banksy they had spotted on high, painting away so openly? Well no, actually it was a young ambitious company called Colossal Media, trying to
reintroduce the art of hand-painted signs, who did the work.