Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Banksy, the UK’s best-known street artist, might be getting too famous for the good of his creations. Their appearance provokes some odd reactions. Of the nine animal paintings he made across London over consecutive days in the past weeks, one — a howling wolf, painted on an old satellite dish — has been stolen, while another, a rhinoceros appearing to mount an abandoned car, has been tagged by another graffiti writer, and the car itself has vanished. A shoal of piranhas stencilled on to a police sentry box in the City has been moved elsewhere for safety. Perhaps only the image at the entrance to London Zoo, showing a gorilla lifting an edge of the fencing to release a sea lion and some birds, is destined for a long life.
The animals series has puzzled seasoned Banksy-watchers, as it seems to have none of the political edge we have come to expect. Although he has raised street art to a level of commercial success never seen before, with works fetching many millions in the salerooms, Banksy still uses his art to needle establishment norms. He also clings to graffiti’s time-honoured night-time guerrilla tactics, pulling off seamlessly planned surprise raids equally well in bustling cities or bleak war zones. A fine example was his 2022 venture into Ukraine, where his signature stencilled artworks suddenly appeared on ruins or military equipment in the centre of Kyiv and in small villages alike.
Secrecy about his identity has long been part of the Banksy mystique. For three decades, those who work with him have upheld their omerta of silence, despite lures from an avid press. Gradually, however, details have seeped out, and we know — or we think we know (the artist has never actually confirmed this) — that he was born Robin Gunningham, in Bristol, in 1973, to a middle-class family; he attended a private school, leaving at the age of 16.
Bristol in the 1970s and 1980s had a vibrant graffiti scene, based in the city’s roughest areas. But in 1989 a police clean-up operation led to the arrest of more than 70 artists, so when the young Banksy took to the night-time streets with his spray cans soon afterwards, anonymity was paramount — he later said that, while other artists’ preoccupations were with form or colour, his was with “police response time”. An early tag of his was Robin Banks (get it?), which morphed into the now familiar Banksy.
Before he left Bristol for London, sometime in the 1990s, Banksy had developed his characteristic use of stencils (to the disgust of some of his peers, who believed street art must be freehand), and his special blend of frivolity and seriousness. A mural from 1999 called “The mild, mild west”, which shows a teddy bear hurling a Molotov cocktail at policemen, prefigures later famous images such as the “Flower Bomber”, a masked rioter hurling a bunch of flowers, created on the West Bank wall.
By using narrative and sociopolitical commentary like this, Banksy diverges from the tradition of graffiti, which is largely calligraphic. An important influence was the French street artist Blek Le Rat, who uses stencils and creates vivid political caricature: Banksy noticeably echoes Blek’s frequent depiction of crafty and characterful rats.
What really sets Banksy apart is his brilliant gamesmanship. He regularly devises highly inventive stunts: some are marketing gimmicks, such as his first London exhibition Turf War, which contained live farm animals brilliantly painted; others, such as placing a life-size figure of a Guantánamo Bay prisoner in Disneyland, are political protest. Many are designed to lampoon the idiocies of the art market and the art-going public. He has hung works of his own inside the world’s great museums: some were not noticed for days. In New York in 2014, when his announcement that he would make a painting a day for a whole month launched a frenzied treasure hunt among hundreds of eager New Yorkers, a shabby figure in an outdoor booth beside Central Park was selling what were actually original Banksy paintings for $60 each. There were very few takers.
Other more tangible creations have included Dismaland, a full-scale dystopian theme park, erected in 2015 in the faded seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare, intended to point up the evils of capitalism.
Two years later, Banksy opened the Walled Off Hotel (say it quickly) in Bethlehem, just yards from the giant wall separating Israel and Palestine, on which he had already made several works using trompe l’oeil effects to “open” the concrete barrier. The hotel — sadly, temporarily closed — is a riot of visual jokes and puns, and Banksy makes no secret of his political opinions.
Perhaps his best-known stunt was at Sotheby’s in London in 2018, when his 2006 painting “Girl with Balloon” — that famous image of the girl with the red balloon, once voted the nation’s all-time favourite — automatically self-destructed moments after it had been hammered down for £1.1mn. Although it was an obvious comment on what he saw as ludicrous auction successes — he had previously painted a large canvas of a saleroom captioned “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit”— there was a surprise sequel. Or was it part of the original plan? The shredded painting, stabilised and renamed “Love is in the Bin”, was back on the market in 2021, selling for an astonishing £18.6mn
Whatever anti-establishment protests Banksy makes, the market just loves him all the more.
Read the full article here
