Banksy (26 page)

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 copyright, 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.)

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.