Nine
In February 2007 the Knightsbridge dealer Acoris Andipa was skiing with his family on the Hornberg in Gstaad when he was interrupted by a furious call from someone doing PR for Banksy. ‘This was my first introduction to the Banksy camp, they have a very unique way of doing things,’ he says now with considerable understatement.
‘There I was literally on top of the mountain and the conversation basically began by her demanding, “What the hell do you think you are doing?” I said, “Excuse me, who are you? What kind of way is this to start a conversation?” ’ The PR said they were representing Banksy – ‘and he was very upset, and I replied that was the furthest intention from what we want.’ The conversation improved slightly from there, but it is easy enough to see why the PR was so upset, for at that moment Andipa must have represented Banksy’s worst nightmare. His credentials as a street artist are both genuine and important to him, but here was Andipa about to put on a Banksy exhibition in his gallery in Knightsbridge and – possibly even worse – already showing Banksys at the Palace hotel in Gstaad, so very far from ‘the street’ that the penthouse suite will set you back €9000 or so a night.
Although Andipa had admired Banksy’s work for almost two years, previously he was never quite sure how it would sell if he tried taking it from ‘underground to overground’. So he had decided to test it out. Before Christmas 2006 he put on a show entitled Hirst and his Contemporaries, and he included about eight Banksys to gauge the reaction of the Knightsbridge crowd. ‘The Banksys just went,’ he said, ‘we sold them all on the opening night. I thought, my goodness. Wow. These were my collectors, my clients, who were here by invitation only. People who buy Picassos only from me. Who buy Damien Hirsts only from me . . .’
Vandal . . . outlaw . . . graffiti . . . Shoreditch . . . never mind, affluent Knightsbridge was gagging for him. Andipa had taken over the gallery from his mother, who used to specialise in icons. But as the market for icons disappeared he had, with some considerable family pain, moved to contemporary art. Now he was going to jump to street art. In the next couple of months Andipa moved fast, spending a lot of money rounding up enough Banksys to make a worthwhile show. Just before his own exhibition opened he took several of the pieces on his annual trip to Gstaad and the winter exhibition at the Palace. ‘What surprised me was that almost every single person who came in to see the show knew about Banksy. These were high rollers and they had learned predominantly from his book Wall and Piece, which they’d been given as a gift or a stocking-filler.’ It was during this exhibition that Andipa had received the phone call up on the mountain, which was followed up back in England by a conversation with Steve Lazarides, still Banksy’s agent at the time, who thought the show was ‘piracy’. Their key worry was that this whole exhibition would make it look as though Banksy had sold out to the Knightsbridge set. For the Andipa Gallery is on Walton Street, a street oozing boutique luxury, a street where Viscount Linley’s wife Serena chose to open her shop selling fragrances, candles and bespoke soaps from Provence; a street where you can buy handmade Oriental rugs, porcelain, designer maternity wear, nursery furniture, monogrammed linen and the like – in short, everything that Banksy was not.
Banksy himself emailed Waldemar Januszczak: ‘If I was conspiracy-minded, I’d say this was a plot to destroy my last shred of credibility. But then I do a good enough job of that myself.’ Even though the exhibition was completely out of context, it was a rare chance to see a lot of Banksys in one place and over the next month about 35,000 people managed to squeeze their way into this small gallery.
‘We had to bring in crowd control to manage everything on Saturdays because the queue would be all the way down Walton Street,’ says Andipa. ‘They were all very polite, predominantly young hoodies, very sweet and very respectful. These were the hardcore street fans who normally wouldn’t dream of coming to Knightsbridge, let alone coming to an art gallery in Knightsbridge.’ And however much Andipa put notices in his catalogue and on the wall of the gallery explaining he was not representing Banksy, the whole thing was too close to Harrods for a notice or two to be any comfort to the Banksy camp.
The exhibition was an outstanding success. Andipa was asking £70,000 for a canvas of Flower Thrower with Stars, produced in an edition of twenty-five; another canvas, Kids on Guns, also in an edition of twenty-five, and which depicts two children standing on a mountain of weapons clasping their balloon and their teddy, was priced at £45,000. (Another financial delight of his chosen technique is that Banksy can, if he wishes, produce more than one canvas from the same stencil.) Andipa had gambled heavily on Banksy and he was richly rewarded. Practically everything sold, and the gallery could expand into the basement to create a very smart second floor. He has put on further Banksy exhibitions in Knightsbridge and his annual Banksy show in Gstaad continues profitably. In some way he seems to enjoy the mischief he has undoubtedly been making, telling the Associated Press after one Gstaad exhibition: ‘Every single person – including clients who’d come in their Lear jets – walked in and said, “Wow, Banksy – and it’s only £150,000.”’ Andipa is one of the very few people who has operated successfully outside Banksy’s control.
For, whatever the outward impression, the fact is that Team Banksy – and it is a very small team – is just as determined as any other celebrity’s team to keep control of events. Take the UK launch, in March 2010, of Exit Through the Gift Shop. The task for any magazine editor when a film is opening is to bag the star for an interview and picture shoot and to bag him or her exclusively. No one else is allowed to have the star on their cover, no one else can brag that they have the exclusive interview. The negotiations with the PRs – ‘fuck pigs’ one frustrated magazine editor used to call them, but never to their face – can be endless: photo approval, interviewer approval, copy approval, all these are up for grabs even though the star seldom gets everything that they want.
For his film Banksy got it accepted that the interview – as usual – could only be by email and that his artwork would be on the cover. What was much more of a PR triumph was that there were not one but two ‘exclusive’ interviews. The Sunday Times claimed an ‘exclusive interview’ and an ‘exclusive cover’ by Britain’s ‘most reclusive artist’. Well, neither totally ‘reclusive’ nor ‘exclusive’, for Time Out went one step further, claiming a ‘world exclusive’ plus ‘his only interview’. For a PR paid to publicise a film it was as if all her dreams had come true.
Jo Brooks, who started her own PR company and continues to run it from Brighton, is one of the key members of the team. She is described by a friend as ‘brilliant, entertaining and sharp as a needle’. Her small, slightly chaotic office suits Banksy’s style. Her first major job for Banksy was organising the press, or rather lack of press, for Turf War in 2003 and she has been with him ever since. He is not her only client but he is certainly her most important. Yet she has a much more difficult task than might be imagined. She has to preserve his anonymity while nourishing his fame; preserve his street credibility while his pictures earn him more and more money; give a Banksy exhibition the sense that it is somehow secret – an insider thing – while letting people know it’s happening. She not only orchestrated all the PR for his exhibition in Bristol, somehow managing to convey the friendly impression that it was a heist – that he had virtually stolen the space from the Bristol City Museum – but even provided the museum with the link to the Los Angeles gallery which put on the summer exhibition the next year. And she has done all this very quietly and successfully without creating enemies for her client or for herself.
But if she is a key member of Team Banksy, she is not the most important member; that title undoubtedly goes – or rather went – to Steve Lazarides, a fellow member of the Bristol clan who was his agent, his manager, his salesman for the six most financially profitable years of Banksy’s life and had a rather more informal arrangement with him for about four years longer than that. Without Banksy, Lazarides – Laz to some – would not be a key purveyor of urban art, or outsider art as he prefers to call it, in London today; but it is also safe to say that without Lazarides Banksy would simply not have the recognition, the influence and the money that he has today.
A colleague who says he does not want to be identified remembers: ‘Steve was Banksy’s manager to all intents and purposes and any sort of enquiry would go through Steve. They were very close, they were really good mates, really good friends. In fact they were a bit of a double act when they were together. They were like naughty schoolboys who suddenly got lucky. Steve was an intelligent, nice, relaxed guy who really loved what he was doing. At one point I think that Banksy was even giving him his cash to put in the bank because he didn’t have an account himself. He was making lots of decisions and taking the pressure off Banksy and he was very protective of him. He knew there was a risk that Banksy would get exploited and he really didn’t want that to happen.’
They are not speaking to each other now. The break-up happened over several months; things started to go badly wrong at the end of 2007 and it was all over by December 2008, when Lazarides sold his shares in Banksy’s Pictures on Walls back to the company. It was a big moment in both men’s lives. Lazarides had lost his best client; Banksy had lost the man who made it all possible. But, like most things to do with Banksy, no one wants to talk about the break-up and when they do talk they leave far more unsaid than said. At one point Lazarides commented: ‘There was no acrimony there. We’d been working together for years and it seemed the right thing to do. He has gone off to do his own thing and here I am running my gallery.’
He did however expand slightly in an interview with Susan Michals for Vanity Fair Daily when she asked what happened: ‘We spent about 10 years together, and I wanted to branch out. You have to grow up. Otherwise you just look like a fool. We haven’t really spoken to each other in a long time; to be honest, I have no idea where he is. And it gave me much more capacity to work with everyone else. It was an amazing ride and I wouldn’t be here without it, but I don’t necessarily miss it.’
She suggested to him it was like a relationship when people don’t define you as an individual but as a couple: ‘It annoys him far more than it annoys me,’ he said with a laugh. ‘A decade is a long time, especially when you’re both as driven as we are.’
As for Banksy, almost the only thing he has said on the subject is, ‘The best I can say right now is, “No comment”.’ But that is not quite the only thing he has said, for on his website at one point he placed a notice saying: ‘Please Note: Banksy has never produced greeting cards, mugs or photo canvases of his work. He is not represented by any of the commercial galleries that sell his work second hand (including Lazarides Ltd, Andipa Gallery, Bank Robber, Dreweatts etc . . .).’ Placing Lazarides in the same company as galleries that Banksy’s team has always tried to fight off, Andipa and Bankrobber, was an insult, a bitchy thing to do.
It somehow doesn’t fit the outlaw image, but the sad fact is that the circle around Banksy is just as full of fun but also of paranoia, unease, jealousy as any other workplace. For example, it is even suggested that Lazarides was allowed a brief appearance in Exit Through the Gift Shop just so they could put a caption underneath him reading: ‘Banksy’s former spokesman.’ At the time of the split employees of both Banksy’s and Lazarides’ galleries were advised they were to break off contact with each other, but given the friendships that already existed at least this separation of staff did not last long.
There are all kinds of explanations floating around to explain the split. One story went that Banksy had paid a visit to the Lazarides household; he had seen the luxury, the comfort, above all the flock wallpaper, and had exploded. The result was a painting, first seen in February 2009, in which a young hoodie is spraying a flock pattern on a wall. The work is called, none too subtly, Go Flock Yourself – just to make the point. It is a good story but there is just one problem with it: it is completely untrue. For one thing, there is no flock wallpaper in Lazarides’ house, and for another it is very unlikely that Banksy ever went round there to check out the wallpaper for himself.
However, another source had a different explanation: ‘They certainly fell out spectacularly. It was over a magazine piece which was an interview that basically had Steve sitting on a throne in his office saying “I made Banksy”. It was more complex than that but Banksy being a control freak didn’t like that at all. So the king builder got dethroned. It was purely a clash of egos really.’ This source has it right: the relationship had been growing very strained anyway but it was the magazine piece that blew the whole thing apart, although the article was not nearly as provocative as he remembers it to be.
In November 2007 Charlotte Eagar interviewed Lazarides for the Evening Standard’s ES magazine. Hunting for this piece I thought that it would be all about Lazarides the king-maker boasting about how he had made Banksy what he is today. But actually, when I found the right article, Banksy’s reaction to it told me more about Banksy than it did about Lazarides. For while Lazarides was certainly happy to talk away about himself and his plans, there was not much in the way of strutting – nowhere did he claim to be the man who made Banksy and he certainly denied the suggestion floating around that he actually was Banksy. The line on the cover called him ‘The man who sells graffiti to Hollywood’, which is true, and inside he was called ‘the man who turns graffiti into gold’ and ‘a marketing genius’, which also happens to be true. There was no picture of him sitting on a throne, he was just leaning casually against a wall. The problem, it appears, was that it was simply a profile of an artist’s manager and the artist hardly got a look in. Amazingly, from that day on it was over and the only question was how they were going to separate out their lives.
One source in Los Angeles suggests that the problem was that Lazarides ‘just got too big. He had about ten or fifteen artists he was representing and he didn’t have the time or even the will to devote all his energy towards Banksy. Banksy was feeling a little bit short changed and he just needed a lot of attention because he had grown up so big and fast.’ But perhaps the best way the split can be explained is in biblical terms. Lazarides had taken Banksy up to the mountain top, he’d tempted him with the likes of Angelina Jolie, fame, money, success. And instead of Banksy telling him ‘Get thee hence,’ he had, for a time at least, lapped it all up. It was this deal with the devil that appears to have ‘weirded out’ Banksy and in the long run ended their relationship.
Lazarides is a very good salesman – there is something of the great American showman P.T. Barnum about him. According to the profile that ended his relationship with Banksy there was ‘nothing of the sharp suit about him’, but that was a few years back – nowadays he can be just as sharp-suited as any other dealer, perhaps more so. He is shaven headed but somehow his friendly smile overcomes any hint of the football yobbo and he is fast talking, entertaining, fun – you feel he could sell you anything. Banksy is an artist who has no interest in being a celebrity and the fact that he has no interest has made him into a celebrity. It was thus a very intense marriage with considerable benefits for both of them. One of the outer circle says, ‘Lazarides was representing a superstar who wanted to remain anonymous. And thus he became a superstar by proxy, he was very much seduced by fame.’
Being a showman Lazarides embroiders history a little, although probably rather less than Banksy does. His father was born in Famagusta in Cyprus, known best by Brits for its cheap package holidays – at least until 1974 when the Turkish army invaded, capturing the town from the Greeks and turning it into a ghost town. His father came to Britain and settled in Bristol where he ran a kebab shop. He married an Englishwoman – although they eventually split up – and Steve, born in 1969, was one of eight children across different marriages. Among his siblings he numbers a plumber/builder, a truck driver, an electrician, a landscape gardener, a school secretary and a pet-life insurance saleswoman. While Lazarides has driven himself way beyond his background, he is still connected – when he opened his Euro Trash show in Los Angeles, for instance, he flew his father out to join him.
By his own account Lazarides started life as a painter and decorator and occasional chicken plucker and concrete mixer, but these jobs were never going to turn into anything permanent. He tried his hand at graffiti, realised he was no good at it and at about the age of fourteen turned to photography instead. He managed to get a place on a foundation course at Filton Technical College (now Filton College) in Bristol where he happened across Inkie, the graffiti artist who was later to introduce Banksy into the city’s graffiti scene. Inkie says now: ‘Where I lent Banksy his “credibility” in the UK graffiti scene, Steve in turn marketed his work to make him the global phenomenon he is now.’
From there he went to Newcastle Poly to study photography while DJing in clubs at the weekend. After a couple of very short-lived jobs, first as a studio runner and then assistant to the photographer David Bailey, he finally found a permanent job painting sets for a film studio. Wilde and Sliding Doors are two of the sets he remembers and some of the people he saw on the set from afar are now his clients. From there his long-time partner Susana introduced him to a friend at Sleazenation, which together with its sister magazine Jockey Slut was aimed – unsurprisingly, with a name like that – at the youth ‘subculture’ slice of the market. ‘They needed a picture editor, so they just gave me the job as I walked in the door,’ he says. In 1997, while he was at Sleazenation, he went off to photograph Banksy, or rather the back of his head. Starting over a cup of coffee – as Mills and Boon might have it – the two outsiders, making their own way in the world, became friends. Banksy was soon tipping Steve off about where to find his latest stencils so he could photograph them before they were wiped out. In Banksy’s first book Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall, published in 2001, all the photographs – and there were a lot of them – were credited to Lazarides. At this time Banksy already had an agent from his Bristol days, Steve Earl, but it was an arrangement without a contract and it ended when Lazarides came along and showed he could do the job better.
Steve Earl’s story is a sad one. He was brought up in Wakefield where his father was a bricklayer. His parents supported him while he was at college training to be a butcher. At nineteen he had gained all the qualifications he needed, but decided he was going to abandon the butcher’s trade for the music industry. At that point he had what his brother Julian describes as ‘a fall-out with my father. My dad said, “Well, if you’re going to be a musician you’re going to have to go fend for yourself.”’ He left home as Stephen Earl Young and ended up in Bristol as Stephen Earl, his surname abandoned. He kept in touch for a few years but the family never saw him again. Many years later his brother, with considerable help from the police, managed to track him down to a flat in Barcelona. But although he wrote to him, Steve never replied and he died alone and pretty much penniless in 2007 aged forty-three. In between Wakefield and Barcelona he had an up and down career in Bristol, London and New York as DJ, DJ’s agent and Banksy’s agent.
Julian talked to Steve’s friends after his brother’s death to try to piece together his history. ‘He seemed to see a talent in people and get them to a certain stage and then someone else would come along and take them off him.’ That was certainly true of Banksy, whom he represented when he first came to London but whom he fell out with in 2003. ‘I don’t think he had a contract or anything like that,’ says his brother. ‘He told a friend “That’s it, I’m over with Banksy, it’s all done with.” But he just carried on with his life, he didn’t seem to get too wound up about it.’
Martin Worster, a former music journalist, met Steve at an internet café in Barcelona where they both worked. ‘He told me he had been Banksy’s manager but he wasn’t any more. It seemed that there had been some dispute over money. I think it was possibly over Blur but I am not sure.’ As well as being entertaining and good company he was also ‘an elusive guy, quite hard to pin down . . . when I first met him he reminded me a bit of an eighties pop star who had fallen on hard times.’
Both in London and Barcelona Steve was never short of a Banksy or two. A DJ who used to visit his office in Notting Hill said it was completely full of Banksy prints and canvases. In Barcelona too he decorated his flat with an impressive array of Banksys, including one massive painting, ‘an amazing piece’ depicting grannies outside a burning supermarket. But he was having money troubles and he traded two Banksy stencils on board for a business debt he owed Martin – since the debt was about £500 it would have proved a bad deal for Steve in the long run, but this was in the days before Banksy had become a big name. Two years later Martin left Barcelona and lost touch until he was told of Steve’s death. Steve Earl had gone out to make his own way and lived a life that had been heartbreakingly close to being a huge success, but in the end he had had to rely on a dwindling supply of Banksys to keep afloat.
Lazarides tells of his first business venture together with Banksy in various different ways, but the essentials are that Banksy needed a lift to Bristol where he was going to sell his prints for either £5 or £10 apiece, depending on which version of the story is more accurate (whatever the price, it was mouth-wateringly cheap). ‘I said, “I’ll buy them all and sell them on.” I had friends who had a few quid who quite liked his stuff, so I wound up selling more than the person that was looking after him [Steve Earl]. And it just spiralled from there.’
So Lazarides was not quite there from day one, and he and Banksy never quite had the same symbiotic relationship as, say, Jay Jopling and Damien Hirst. But he was in the picture from early on, and Acoris Andipa says, ‘It was Lazarides building it from nothing. He is the one to be credited for all the hard work he did.’ Lazarides himself says, ‘I think it was very much a two-way street in the sense that we helped each other in those early days. It’s probable that without Banksy I may not have got to where I am today.’ Note the use of the word ‘probable’ rather than ‘certain’ or ‘true’ – understandably he is not going to give Banksy all the credit.
He says that his route to the gallery world ‘started from selling work out of the boot of my car in a pub car park’. It is so difficult to imagine now that only a few short years ago it was a real struggle to offload Banksy prints. From the car boot sale he advanced to making the rounds of London dealers. One of them remembers: ‘Stephen Lazarides would come round with rolls of these prints under his arm and try to flog them off to us at, you know, £50 a pop. And we did buy them and we used to get discounts from him before anyone had even heard of Banksy prints.’ From there things progressed so that Lazarides was wholesaling prints to places like Selfridges (yes, Selfridges!), the Tom Tom Gallery in London, the Green Leaf bookshop in Bristol, and Tate Modern – Banksy was not hanging on the walls but you could buy a print there. Sales soon reached a point where Lazarides no longer needed the smaller outlets. It was a fairly brutal moment. The same dealer remembers it well: ‘The thing that irked us a bit was one minute we were always first to be phoned, first to be contacted about new releases, and then suddenly the gate came down. No discounts and not even no discounts, they didn’t want to sell to us as dealers at all. It was a kind of mean-spirited thing more than anything else. It was just like “You’ve been useful to us and now bugger off.”’
In 2002 Banksy released his first properly organised, editioned print run, Rude Copper – a stencil of a policeman giving the finger – in an edition of 250, fifty of which were signed. Originally the edition was only going to be 100 prints but at the last minute they raised it to 250 to see what happened. In those early days, says a fan who witnessed it all, everything was somewhat disorganised. ‘There were 250 copies and loads of extras. Number One might be unsigned, although it would be stamped, and then someone might want the second one signed, so two or three would get signed and then there would be more unsigned. There was chaos, really, about which was part of the edition and which wasn’t. And there wasn’t any consistency.’ These prints went for around £40; today they can be picked up at auction for about £8000, or around £13,000 for the few that have a hand-sprayed graffiti background. In the next year fourteen additional prints were released in editions that ran from 500 to 750. Ironically, given the fact that today a signed print always fetches a considerably higher price than an unsigned one, it was the signed prints, costing just that little bit extra, which were the hardest to sell – ‘They used to be hanging around for ages,’ says one of the team who was trying to sell them.
So, suddenly, roughly 7000 Banksy prints or more were being released on to the market and life had to get a bit more serious. Early in 2004 Pictures on Walls was formally incorporated, the first of Banksy’s companies. The finance was put up by Jon Swinstead, who published Sleazenation and Jockey Slut, and POW’s first base was at PYMCA, a youth culture picture agency established by Lazarides and Swinstead on the floor above the Sleazenation office.
By the end of 2004, Swinstead says, he had ‘walked away’ from POW, but he did not want to go into any further detail. Steve Parkin, who used to employ Lazarides as a DJ in his Newcastle days, replaced him and put up the second tranche of finance which kept the company afloat. The majority shareholder was – and remains – Jamie Hewlett, the creator of Tank Girl and co-creator of Gorillaz, while Lazarides had eighteen shares. Nowhere in the records is there ever a mention of Banksy – perfectly legally, without shares and without a directorship, he is relying on his friendship with Hewlett for his involvement with the company.
White cube galleries might be the holy grail for ambitious young artists, but as the demand for the prints they were releasing grew, both Lazarides and Banksy realised they had stumbled upon a new eager audience for art among people who had never set foot in a traditional gallery and had no desire to do so. Both of them enjoyed slagging off these galleries, although Lazarides is the more loud-mouthed about them and the ‘chippy bastards working behind the desk’. There’s nothing he hates more than a white cube gallery: ‘I do black walls, I do red walls, vintage wallpaper, anything other than fucking white. I have a pathological hatred of white walls.’ Banksy himself has always tended to be more rude about the art inside the galleries than the galleries themselves: ‘Anti-graffiti groups like to say tagging intimidates people, but not as much as modern art. That stuff is deliberately designed to make normal people feel stupid.’
Their way of selling art sounds simple now but at the time it was revolutionary. People could see for themselves a piece of Banksy’s work on the street, and if they lived too far away or it had already been washed off by the anti-vandal patrols there were always good photographs of it on the internet – it would become something of a contest to see who could get their picture up on the web first. Some of these street pieces would eventually become limited edition prints which could be bought on the web without their purchaser ever having to venture into a gallery – accidentally the piece on the street had become an advertisement for itself. These online customers buying prints give Banksy a wider and more active web base than probably any other artist, living or dead.
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.
Today Colossal Media boast in their promotional material about the rats they drew for Banksy. ‘Colossal had to execute all four walls simultaneously while maintaining complete secrecy about the project.’ For months they worked with Banksy’s team ‘on site acquisition and preparation’. Banksy provided ‘digital renderings of hand drawn sketches’ which they then painted on to the walls. They are proud to claim that ‘Colossal’s role in the project was to function as any other artist’s tool – as a means to an end.’
Banksy was open about it, despite his loathing of billboards. ‘I wanted to play the corporations at their own game, at the same scale and in the same locations. The advantage of billboard companies is that they’ll let you write anything for money, even if what you write is questioning the ethics of letting someone write anything because they have money.’
But the next step, getting other people to do his street pieces, is more controversial and certainly less clear. Ben Eine was asked by the magazine Very Nearly Almost: ‘You used to paint with Banksy in the city, is it true you used to paint rats as well?’
‘I used to help him paint stuff on the street. At some point, yes, I would’ve painted a rat. But it wasn’t like I was going out with his stencils doing his rats.’
The clearest statement comes from Shepard Fairey. Two possible Banksys had been spotted in Boston at the time of the release of Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was a cue for great excitement and efforts by the Boston Globe to discover whether or not they were real. The reporter could not of course get to Banksy but did talk to Fairey, who was very matter of fact: ‘Banksy doesn’t actually execute a lot of the street pieces anymore.’ So if it was a Banksy in Boston – and Fairey was very doubtful – it was not necessarily by Banksy. It may have been by his assistants: ‘To me, it doesn’t matter whether he was there. He orchestrated it. If you’re still into believing that Batman cleans up the city by himself, fine.’
Quite how much or how little he uses assistants, or just friends out for the joyride, will probably never be clear. But the key point is this: without Banksy as the inspiration there would be no Banksys of any kind. As he himself says, ‘I paint my own pictures but I get a lot of help building stuff and installing it. I have a great little team.’
And the more I examined this team, not just the team that is ready when he needs help with a big project, but also the more permanent team protecting his reputation, his commercial rights, his prices, the more it became clear that he functions in much the same way as any commercially successful artist would – albeit outside the traditional gallery system. And it is perhaps this fact, the fact that in many ways the outsider is now an insider, rather than any real worry about his identity, that this team – which makes very few mistakes – is so determined to hide.