Ten
In February 2008, seven months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, at a time when people were still confident enough to splash big money on good causes, New York’s rich and famous gathered together at Sotheby’s for a night of serious spending. The event, organised by Bono, Damien Hirst, Sotheby’s and the Gagosian gallery, turned out to be the biggest charity art auction ever, raising $42.5m to support AIDS programmes in Africa.
The auction had everything. As well as giving work himself, Damien Hirst hand wrote letters to each artist asking them to contribute their work. ‘I didn’t expect the result to be as good as it was, but everybody’s dug deep and given us major works rather than drawings and that. It feels like a real exhibition,’ he said. Bono was the star, wearing a black military-style jacket and sunglasses, exhorting the 700 guests to spend and spend again and, since it was Valentine’s Day, giving them an a capella version of ‘All You Need is Love’ to set them on their way.
And he led by example, spending more than $1 million on several pieces for himself. Hirst gave seven works which made a total of just over $19 million, including Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way, a pill cabinet filled with drugs for the treatment of HIV, which sold for $7,150,000.
It was a sort of Hello! love-in. John McEnroe, Martha Stewart, Queen Noor, Dennis Hopper, Michael Stipe, Helena Christensen, Liya Kebede, Russell Simmons, Ziyi Zhang and Christy Turlington (who spent $170,500 on a watercolour by Francisco Clemente – who some years earlier had painted her portrait) were a few of the headline names.
Banksy was one of the artists Hirst had asked for help and he gave three pieces. Lot 69, Ruined Landscape, one of his detourned paintings, a rural scene with ‘This is not a photo opportunity’ pasted across it, sold for $385,000, just above the estimate.
Lot 33A was his Vandalised Phone Box, a red telephone box bent to almost ninety degrees and bleeding red paint where a pickaxe had been stuck through it. The phone box had originally been placed in Soho Square but it was soon carted off by an unsympathetic Westminster Council because it did not have planning permission.
Happily Banksy was allowed to claim it back, for now it went for $605,000, double the estimated price. Three years later the buyer was revealed to be another of those millionaires that Banksy complains about: Mark Getty, grandson of J. Paul Getty. He told the Sunday Telegraph, ‘I bought it as a joke – the phone box is being killed, see?’ The joke being that there were once rumours – untrue – that his billionaire grandfather had installed a pay phone to ensure guests would not make calls at his expense and this was his – costly – way of ‘killing off the phone box rumours’. The phone box now sits in front of the library on Getty’s 2500-acre estate in the Chiltern Hills.
But it was Lot 34, Keep it Spotless, that had everyone excited. The story according to Hirst was that he had been rounding up work for the auction and Banksy told him, ‘Give me a painting and I’ll mess around with it.’ So Hirst had given him one of his spot paintings – it has always seemed as though he has quite a few to spare – and Banksy stencilled a maid hitching up the spots as though they were part of a curtain so she could brush away the dirt underneath. It was a clever piece, and before the auction Hirst showed the work to a reporter: ‘I love his work and I have to say I like my own,’ he said. ‘I think it looks brilliant, doesn’t it? Sweeping it under the carpet.’ The painting fetched $1.8 million, a price that put Banksy on a completely new level, although the joke at the time was that it was either a very expensive Banksy or a very cheap Hirst.
The sale did two things. As Bono put it, ‘art and love, sex and money came together’ to raise a huge amount of money for AIDS work in Africa, but the auction also established price records for seventeen artists including Marc Quinn, Howard Hodgkin and Banksy himself. There was no instant reward other than a feel-good factor for Banksy, but other artists’ agents use auctions – and are sometimes actually bidding at them – as a way of establishing a public price which they can refer to when selling privately to collectors. So what this auction did for Banksy and other artists was to reassure collectors, particularly in a year when the financial world was collapsing all around them, that the prices they were paying privately were supported – and indeed in this case far surpassed – in the auction houses.
Keep it Spotless had all the charity hype behind it and, perhaps more important, the fact that it was a Hirst painting that Banksy had defaced. In the real world his prices were nowhere close to what was paid for Keep it Spotless, but they were jumping up in astounding amounts. In June 2005 a record for a Banksy original was set at £21,000; just over a year later his Mona Lisa sold for £57,600. In 2007, the year after Barely Legal in Los Angeles had opened up the American market, it was difficult to keep track of the increase. Bombing Middle England fetched £102,000 in February; Space Girl and Bird had an estimated price of £10,000 to £15,000 but sold at Bonhams in April for £288,000, and The Rude Lord reached £322,900 at Sotheby’s in October. Bonhams followed this up with their first ‘Urban Art’ sale in February 2008, which essentially gave street artists a category all of their own – a slightly less threatening category than ‘street art’ itself or ‘graffiti art’. But whatever it was called, it was the night that street art was seduced, without too much of a struggle, into the mainstream and Gareth Williams, Bonhams’ Urban Art specialist, remembers it well. ‘The first sale was phenomenal beyond belief. I had been working at an auction house for fifteen years and never seen anything like it. The global press interest was just crazy. We were late in starting the sale, so many people were there; they were queuing to register so we couldn’t actually start on time. All the Banksys commanded good prices, but it wasn’t just Banksy, the whole sale sold with the exception of one lot.’
So how important is Banksy in this whole urban art world? ‘Very important. He kind of kick-started the market. There are lots of other artists out there who are equally deserving, but I am not necessarily convinced they would have had so much limelight and achieved such good results without him. He’s a household name. Everyone’s grandma knows Banksy.’
At the end of that same month Sotheby’s put up for sale Banksy’s Simple Intelligence Testing with an estimated price of £150,000. It is a work in five parts where a monkey finds the right box with the bananas hidden in it, but then outwits his intelligence testers first by eating the bananas and then by escaping through a vent in the ceiling. It fetched £636,500, which apart from that achieved by Keep It Spotless remains by far the highest price ever paid for a Banksy. Simple Intelligence Testing had been painted in 2000 and sold at the Severnshed exhibition, so it would have been the original buyer who made the money rather than Banksy.
But he would have done better out of Rude Lord, an eighteenth-century portrait of an aristocrat by Thomas Beach for which Banksy paid £2000 and then detourned so that the aristocrat was giving us all the finger. He finished the painting in 2006, in time for his Los Angeles show, and then Steve Lazarides sold it on to a collector who swiftly put it into auction. This very short chain of events all happened within the space of a year, so it is one painting in these early auctions where Banksy would have received, if not the auction price, then at least a decent price for his work. But for the most part, as Banksy put it, ‘The auction houses were just selling paintings that I’d done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, you know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like fifty grand.’
Although no Banksy work has gone beyond the price of Simple Intelligence Testing, it is still a pretty golden ceiling for any artist to reach, particularly a graffiti artist. Indeed it is this street art background that is his problem. Compared to the likes of Hirst or Jeff Koons, Banksy is a pauper; comfortable, making good money, but not a multi-millionaire. He says, ‘I don’t have a lavish lifestyle,’ and others support him. A collector agrees that ‘He’s pretty low maintenance’ and Mike Snelle, director of the influential Shoreditch gallery Black Rat Projects, says: ‘From what I’m told he’s not living in a dream mansion with a pool. He lives in an ordinary house and gives a lot of the money away. People like Banksy aren’t people who want to buy Porsches and Rolexes and things.’
But with graffiti there are – or there were – a different set of rules. If street art is somehow free art for the people, then what is it doing fetching such high prices in the auction houses? Andy Warhol in the past seemed positively to enjoy the fact that he could make so much money from his art, as does Damien Hirst today, but with Banksy it sits uneasily; it might well be temptingly enjoyable, but he still finds it slightly difficult to square with the softly leftish view of the world that comes through in his work.
Having complained about art galleries becoming trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires, he has now found himself becoming one of the trophies and he doesn’t like it – although the money may have proved handy. It was at the time of all the excitement about the prices he was achieving that he released a print known as Morons. An auctioneer is shown hard at work taking bids for a painting which is displayed on a stand next to him. The reference Banksy used in making this print is almost certainly the sale of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers back in 1987 for what then seemed an astonishing world record price of £25 million. But the canvas the auctioneer is selling has no sunflowers, only the words ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MORONS ACTUALLY BUY THIS SHIT’ scrawled across it. When the print of the picture went up for sale on his website, the sales pitch was not the usual kind: ‘Banksy makes a cr*p picture about how people pay a lot of money for cr*p pictures, which someone then ends up paying a lot of money for. A portion of irony eating itself, anyone?’
An edition was printed in Los Angeles at the time of his big show there and a much larger edition was subsequently issued in the UK, bringing the total number of prints to just over 1000. Banksy took at least £120,000 from these prints; he could have taken much more, for they were soon selling in the auction houses for up to £5000, but nevertheless it was an enjoyable example of him having his cake and eating it too.
As is the case with almost any artist, the price private collectors pay for his paintings is impossible to establish accurately. However, there are two ways of getting some sort of feeling about the prices for Banksy’s originals. The first is through the auction houses, where the prices are visible and can be tracked over the years. The website artnet.com, which has emerged as the art world’s key recorder of auction prices on the internet, shows the way new collectors with new money bounded into the Banksy market in 2007, sustained it throughout 2008 and then paused for a very deep breath. The market in Banksys, like that in most other commodities, has yet to reach those heights again, although it would be unfair to suggest there has been too much of a bubble – his prices remain strong, just not as strong.
If you look at Banksy’s prices recorded on the web, no post-2008 price comes in the top ten. Insane Clown, which sold in New York in November 2009 for $386,500, reaches number 11. His prices in 2010 and 2011 have averaged around £56,000. Compare this with 2008, where anyone with a Banksy on the wall suddenly realised they could be rich. The canvases coming to market were double the number available in 2010 and the average price was around £100,000 – and that excludes the three sold for record amounts in the New York charity auction. Even some of his prints were reaching figures of around £5000 and occasionally nearer to £10,000.
But if you wanted to sell, you had to hurry, because from July 2008 onwards, as the world financial markets fretted and failed, an increasing number of Banksys were marked ‘Bought In’ because they did not reach their reserve price. December 2008 was a particularly dismal month when twenty-eight lots were auctioned, all but one of them prints, but only two sold; the rest had to be bought in. Sellers either had to lower their prices or wait for better days. But a collector, particularly anyone buying a canvas, today can be reassured that although the market has fallen from its height, it is still a healthy one.
The other source is the accounts for Pest Control Office Ltd, Banksy’s company, which has taken over his sales from Steve Lazarides. Although the details are scant, the way he has chosen to run his business life through private limited companies means, ironically, that there is probably more financial information publicly available on the anonymous Banksy than on any other artist. In June 2010 Pest Control’s assets were £1.1 million, a figure that had jumped by a hefty £900,000 in the year after Lazarides left. There is no way of telling in these abbreviated accounts where exactly all this £900,000 came from, but it is a reasonable assumption to make that a very high percentage of it came from the sale of Banksy originals.
The prints are easier to track than the canvases, because they are all sold through his website and the prices have been there for all to see. Banksy’s prints are a phenomenon in themselves. As we have seen, he started out like any other artist, selling prints to any gallery that would take them. You could usually pick them up for £40 unsigned or £100 signed. But then as the demand grew he discovered that he did not need galleries at all. He was selling to a computer-literate generation, and although some preferred to go to Banksy’s gallery in Shoreditch and queue for hours for a newly released print, many were happy to see a print online, buy it online and then put it up on their wall without ever putting a foot inside a gallery.
If they decided they didn’t like their print, or decided simply that they wanted to make money out of it, there was always eBay. They weren’t stuck with it – they could make an instant profit. As one dealer says: ‘Banksy wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for eBay. The two just happened to come along at the same time. It was happenstance rather than planning. No one flipped art before then. It just hadn’t happened. But with Banksy people queued for four or five hours for a print and by the time they were out of the queue it would be on eBay.’
‘All of a sudden it was like the new gold rush,’ says Steve Lazarides. ‘You could go out, buy a Banksy print at 250 quid. The next day you could sell it for two and a half grand. What other investment is going to make ten times your money overnight?
‘And then the next owner, if they were lucky, could sell it on again for five grand . . . so it was a no-brainer in those days of easy credit.
‘We’d open a show and you’d have people running at you. You’d be trying to sell something to a client and you’d have someone tapping you on the shoulder . . . saying “No, no, I want to buy it.” There was one instance where we caught someone flipping a work in the gallery before they’d even paid for it.’
For Banksy this posed a problem that he has never quite dealt with, one to which it is actually impossible for him to find the right answer. He wanted to keep his prints at prices not too far removed from what his original fans could pay, but as he said, ‘Every time I sell things at a discount rate, most people put them on eBay and make more money than I charged them in the first place. The novelty with that soon wears off.’ His prices have gone up steadily, if slowly – but so too has demand. A Banksy print can still be flipped very profitably on eBay, although the seller will not make the money they could have made in the boom years.
His print operation is unique both in its scale and in its demand. Go back through the old web postings when a rumour went out that a Banksy print was about to be launched and you will see how the hardcore Banksy fans went mental. Reading these postings now on the Urban Art Association website it seems comic, but at the time it became a matter of life and death for those involved in the chase. A millisecond after a print was released, the buyer had to be on the Banksy website and putting the print in their basket or else it was too late. Either the site crashed because everyone was on it, or the prints had all gone. Some took the afternoon off, the day off, or chose to ‘work at home’, while others stayed up in the hope that it would be released in the dead of night. For Banksy has always been a bit of a tease; the word would go out that a print was going to be released but no definite date or time was given as to when. Desperate buyers discussed the latest rumour on the site as they waited: ‘Stuff like this makes me a nervous wreck for days and nights.’ They dared not leave their computer: ‘I’m a diabetic and I’m going to miss lunch because of this. If I die can I sue?’ ‘I need to pee. Can I wait – no. I bet it drops now.’ This could go on and on for days; then suddenly, instantly it was there, and then it was gone. Despair followed: ‘It’s sold out, gone, goodbye.’ ‘f**k missed it.’ ‘Did anyone get one?’ ‘I need this. Anyone who carted it and doesn’t want it I got 1000 pounds!’ ‘Went into a meeting and just got out and they’re all sold out. Gutted.’ ‘I want to cry . . .’ ‘. . . Get in the queue.’ But there was also unadulterated joy: ‘Got one yeahhhhhhhhhh. Three years of just losing out and now I bag my first Banksy.’ And this joy was sometimes coupled with a hint of profit to come: ‘Yessss. My first Banksy Yess. What’s the edition size?’ Recently this online agony has largely been eliminated, for there is now a lottery system online, as well as the chance to queue all night for those who don’t want to trust to luck.
There is a site on the web called www.banksy-prints.com. It is a work in progress, although midway through 2010 it seemed to run out of progress, but someone with impressive dedication has tried to catalogue every Banksy print, for no visible financial reward. With the help of other websites, particularly www.UrbanArtAssociation.org. and www.thebanksyforum.com, and from talking to collectors, it is possible to give a rough outline of the Banksy print operation. In all he has created forty-eight different limited edition prints over eight years. They used to be divided unequally between signed and unsigned but more recently they are all coming signed – which makes them more difficult to fake. They have brought in at least £3.8 million and probably a fair bit more, since on the occasions when the size of the print run or the exact price is unclear I have gone in my calculations for a lower figure. In addition this sum does not account for the very limited number of artist’s proofs which come with any print run. His highest figure was attained in 2006, when a run of six prints first shown in Los Angeles raised over £1 million. In 2002 he needed to sell fifteen different prints to make just under £500,000. In 2009 he could make the same money by releasing just two.
His most successful print was the portrait of Kate Moss, done in very much the same style as Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which is considered the holy grail by many collectors. It was far more expensive at source than any other Banksy print before or after, so it is not representative of Banksy prints in general; it is almost as though he was saying ‘This is what I could do if I was really trying to make money.’ It was first shown at the Crude Oils exhibition in Notting Hill along with all the rats. There were five canvases at £5000 each, thus £25,000, but interestingly, some fans consider the prints better than the canvases. One collector suggests, ‘The image works far better aesthetically as a print: clean, graphic and luxurious. For me the texture of the canvas weakens the overall impact – looking rather cheap, like the inkjet on canvas images you can order through Snappy Snaps.’
The prints came in an edition of fifty at £1500 each – but despite the price they sold out, so that was another £75,000. Two months later, in another nod to Andy Warhol and his different colourways – Mint Marilyn, Cherry Marilyn, Orange Marilyn and so on – Banksy issued six further colourways. There were twenty of each colour. These prints were £2500 each – although, rather like being at a supermarket, you could have six for the price of five. So a set would cost you £12,500. This release would have brought in an additional £250,000.
At this point, with the print and the five canvases having already raised £350,000, it becomes more difficult. For there were a further twelve artist’s proofs of the colourways edition and five of the original edition on canvas. It is impossible to tell what happened to these, although when Steve Lazarides opened his gallery in Soho an artist’s proof of Kate Moss was selling for £4000. At a conservative estimate Banksy, or rather Banksy, his gallery Pictures on Walls and Lazarides, must together have made at least £400,000 from Kate Moss, and probably a fair amount more.
But this is nothing compared to what the buyers made. (The highest price reached at auction for Kate has been £96,000 in 2008, although the auction price is usually around the £40,000 to £50,000 mark.) Looking around an exhibition of prints at the Black Rat Gallery, I came across a Kate Moss which looked stunning hung against the gallery’s bare brick walls. It was marked ‘Price on Application’ and when I duly applied, Mike Snelle, the director of the gallery, told me that he was selling it on behalf of a collector who had already turned down an offer well above £100,000.
I told him how much I liked it but asked him what Kate was adding to Marilyn – she might be an icon but she is certainly not up there in the icon charts with the likes of Marilyn. There was a pause and he then replied: ‘I could say Kate Moss. I guess I think it’s playing with the original Warhol idea. I think the way to view it is that there is a whole generation of people now who perhaps haven’t been very interested in art in the past who have come to art through street art and who will recognise the Banksy version of the Warhol over the original Warhol. I think that’s a very Warhol idea.’
So will they even know that there is a Warhol version? ‘I think they will, but they might know it subsequently to seeing this one. And I think there is something interesting to that idea. Something playful and clever about it.’ Clever in what way? ‘Clever in the idea of celebrity fame, modern culture and the idea that you can distort something to the point where you can change the meaning of it so that the original version is no longer recognised and it’s a back to front thing. People are seeing that and learning about the Warhol. And there is something slightly subversive about that idea.’
At the end of 2010 I decided it was time to enter the Banksy market myself. In October a new Banksy appeared on a wall in Southwark, a barking dog painted very deliberately in the style of Keith Haring being taken for a walk on a chain by a hoodie who looked as menacing as the dog. Just over a month later Banksy opened his annual Christmas show, although this year it was called Marks & Stencils rather than the usual Santa’s Ghetto. Having heard via the web that the Southwark stencil had now been turned into a new print which would be released during this exhibition, I took myself down to the empty shop on Berwick Street in Soho which he had taken over for Marks & Stencils. Admittedly it was not a big space; nevertheless there was still a queue at the door. As I stood waiting in the freezing cold I thought it might be hype, it might be greed or, forget the cynicism, it might just actually be people interested in street art . . . but what other modern artist could set up in a shop and have a queue standing on a freezing cold winter’s day waiting to get in? I stood in this queue for about half an hour. On one side of the street I could examine Banksy’s shop window, inside which a newly constructed breezeblock wall advertised ‘Street Art now in a gallery near you’ and a teddy bear sat slightly lewdly on a plaster column (well, this was Soho). On the opposite side of the street, Seymores World offered XXX DVDs, as well as Delay Spray, Spanish Fly and Spankarama DVDs.
Eventually I was let in to two floors of Banksarama. This, like his other Ghetto shows, was anything but a white-walled space. There was no space on any wall; every inch was taken in a deliberate jumble of work, while the basement was given over to Dran, a vaguely subversive French street artist many of whose works were painted on cardboard. In amongst all this, but not given any special prominence, was the print of the hoodie with his dog – it now had a name, Choose Your Weapon. This surely was too good to be true, a Banksy print there for me after only half an hour’s queuing. Of course it was a fantasy: you could look but you could not buy.
For that you had to wait for the off, announced via email by Banksy’s gallery. And Banksy was teasing yet again, for almost every day there was a new email to be found from the gallery, frustratingly titillating, announcing the release of more prints from the show, but none of them by Banksy. Finally the day arrived. The price was £450. There were 175 available online – the names would be drawn by lottery, so I did not have to sit up all night hitting the refresh button. Or if you wanted to go down to queue all night at the gallery, there would be another 200 on sale.
I have to confess that the thought of an all-night queue in December in Shoreditch was too much for me. I applied online. And, reading the blog artonanisland.blogspot.com, I was very glad I did. The blogger, Evan Schiff, a Californian in his early thirties who had been living in London for three years, heard the rumour that the print was about to be released, so at 9 p.m. on Friday night he hurried down to Soho. He was about 180th in line! An hour and a half later the news was out: the prints would go on sale the next morning but they would be sold from Banksy’s gallery, Pictures on Walls in Shoreditch.
‘You’ve never seen so many people move that fast’, he blogged. ‘People running through the streets of central London trying to buy cabs from others who were waiting. I started a mad dash with two guys who were in back of me in line. They had a car and I did a few calculations and thought I’d get there quickest with them. I reckon it took about twenty-five minutes. We parked about three blocks before POW’s showroom. In a dead sprint we ran to the queue and when the dust settled, ended up being about 150th in line. Result!
‘Having come straight from work I wasn’t prepared for the cold at all. No sleeping bag, no long underwear, I hadn’t even worn my scarf that day. However, nervous that in the 10 minutes it would take for me to run home they’d pass out tickets and I’d miss out, I stayed the course.
‘The night from 2–6am was fairly uneventful save for the odd fight (two that I counted) or figuring out who was gonna walk across the street to get tea (which started the night at about 50p a cup and ended the night at a pound a cup). However, at about 6:30 our second bout of absolute bedlam. A security guard/POW person showed up with tickets. And the queue absolutely imploded. People from the back running to the front, people at the front trying to fight them off. And perhaps worst of all, CARLOADS of people pulling up and walking right up to the ticket dude and getting their tickets. It was terrible.’ He was being pushed further and further down the queue.
‘Once all the touts and queue jumpers were sorted out the fat bald security guy started making his way through the line. I was nervous as hell, cracked out from being up all night, and just hoping me and the people I was with would be sorted out. As he came closer to us (I was about 10 people away at this point) he got to number 170 and said “that’s it, that’s the last number.”
‘Devastation. I can’t believe I waited that bloody long for NOTHING.’
He had started on his way home when a couple of people who were behind him in the queue stopped their taxi and told him to get in. They had heard a hint that there might be a few more prints on sale back at Marks & Stencils. He arrived there to find he was number seventeen in the queue. This time they established their own rules, drawing numbers on everyone’s hand.
‘At 9am, the first employee showed up and we went up to him. “We’re here, we will gladly go home, please just tell us if we can buy a print here.” “We have 60 prints for you here.” Absolute bedlam. He passes out tickets and for the next few hours we all sat around telling stories, talking art, and really enjoying each other’s company.
‘When my number was eventually called to go in and buy my print, I pumped my fist and walked in to the store.’ He had his Banksy. He says now that it is not his favourite Banksy image but ‘it was my first Banksy and one that will be on my wall for ever.’
The Banksy queue has become something of a club. One successful member of this ‘club’ says, ‘You got to remember we meet every year and there are people there you’ve met at the last sale and they just come up to you saying “Oh, how you doing?”; it’s lovely, it’s a really nice community, but the problem you’ve got is that before I had collected my print of Choose Your Weapon somebody at the front of the queue had already put theirs on eBay for £10,000.’ He says the Choose Your Weapon queue was the only bad queue he has experienced: ‘There were fights and all sorts, it was scary.’ And while in a way it seems amazing to queue all night for a piece of art, in many ways it seems rather more admirable (and profitable too, if you want it to be) than queuing all night for, say, a football ticket or a good view of the royal wedding or the New Year sales. (Banksy eventually issued a further edition of fifty-eight prints in ‘Queue Jumper Edition (Warm Grey)’ for those who missed out in the scrum at Shoreditch and had their names and details taken by one of his staff.) As for me, I stayed warm and comfortable, but unhappily my number never came up in the online lottery.
Banksy took close to £200,000 for this one print but did not keep any of it for himself. He donated all the money from the proceeds to the Russian art collective Voina – war in Russian – which performs public protest happenings that include everything from orgies to throwing cats at bored McDonald’s workers on International Workers’ Day. When he decided to make the donation, two of Voina’s members were in jail charged with aggravated hooliganism and facing a prison sentence of up to five years. Lucy Ash had reported on their deeds on the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent, detailing how they had painted an erect penis on a drawbridge across the River Neva in St Petersburg. Every time the drawbridge opened, the penis, 65m tall and 27m across, was there in all its glory opposite the building which is the local headquarters of the KGB’s successors, the Federal Security Service. (The penis reached a shortlist for a state prize for contemporary art, mysteriously slipping off the list and then reemerging as the winner, with $14,000 being awarded to the group.) Rather more seriously, the group had overturned seven police cars in protest against police corruption.
Banksy must have been one of the people listening to her report, for soon afterwards she was in Italy about to interview the mayor of an impoverished hilltop village when her mobile rang. ‘It felt a bit surreal and I wondered at first if the call was a hoax,’ she reported. ‘After all, it is not every day you get phoned up by one of the world’s most elusive artists.’ It was not actually Banksy but his ubiquitous PR Jo Brooks, who told her that Banksy wanted to help.
‘How much do you reckon it’ll cost,’ Brooks asked, ‘to get them out?’
‘Uncharacteristically, I was lost for words. I mumbled that I was not sure whether he could help get them out of prison, but that I was certain that the artists would be most grateful for his support.’
In very simple terms the donation worked – and there was still a lot of it to spend, which they say will in turn be used to help ‘political prisoners’. Early in 2011, after almost four months in jail, they were released, having posted bail of 300,000 roubles, about £6500 each. Although their troubles were far from over, Banksy had secured their release from prison, even if he could not get rid of the charges against them. He had also raised their profile across the web to a level they could never have dreamed of, and this perhaps had made them just a little safer.
There are many ways Banksy could make more money. He could take a few of the commercial jobs offered to him – if Blek le Rat can don a Hugo Boss suit to judge a Hugo Boss stencil competition, then why not Banksy at what would probably be a much higher price? He could license the Banksy brand. He could put up the price of his prints. He could keep more of the money he does make by cutting back on the eclectic range of good causes he supports. He could accept the sort of interior commissions now on offer – the late Gunter Sachs’ castle at Lake Worth in Austria is one of the best examples of graffiti taken on to inside walls. Yet even though he does none of these things he still can’t win, he will still be accused of being a sell-out. Thus he remembers the time he went to see the film Precious, where they played the trailer for Exit Through the Gift Shop before the main feature. It was not an enjoyable experience: ‘Someone two rows in front shouted “OH MY GOD, BANKSY IS SUCH A SELL-OUT” and I shrank into my seat.’
Ever since starting this book I have been getting Banksy birthday cards and Banksy Christmas cards and plain Banksy cards from friends who thought I needed encouragement. Banksy makes no money out of those at all. The graffiti is ‘attributed to Banksy’ but the copyright of the photograph of Banksy’s work is with the photographer and the card company. All the mugs, the cards, the cheaply printed canvases, the iPod skins, the laptop covers, the Banksy buttons, even the ‘Banksy style’ decorative wall stickers, are rip-offs. The producers of all these money-spinners are no doubt encouraged by the words of Banksy himself who told the Sunday Times ‘if you’ve built a reputation on having a casual attitude towards property ownership, it seems a bit bad-mannered to kick off about copyright law.’ Unless he has some secret licensing deal, which seems very unlikely indeed, he has nothing to do with any of them; he just happens to produce the art on the streets for others to profit from.
While the souvenirs could possibly be money-making ventures for him, he could make much bigger money if he was prepared to do commercial work. For, as graffiti crosses over to the mainstream – brand managers now reference his work as ‘intelligent mischief’ – there could be no greater prize than having Banksy as your figurehead.
As far back as 2003 he was being courted for advertising jobs. The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone asked him if there was work he would turn down on principle. He replied: ‘Yeah, I’ve turned down four Nike jobs now. Every new campaign they email me to ask me to do something about it. I haven’t done any of those jobs. The list of jobs I haven’t done now is so much bigger than the list of jobs I have done. It’s like a reverse CV, kinda weird. Nike have offered me mad money for doing stuff.’
‘Never’ is a dangerous word to use, but three years later he told his friend Shepard Fairey: ‘I don’t do anything for anybody any more, and I will never do a commercial job again.’ He explained in some detail why he had done the cover for the Blur album, not that anyone was accusing him of selling out over that. ‘I’ve done a few things to pay the bills, and I did the Blur album. It was a good record and it was quite a lot of money. I think that’s a really important distinction to make. If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial. Otherwise you’ve got to be a socialist rejecting capitalism altogether, because the idea that you can marry a quality product with a quality visual and be a part of that even though it’s capitalistic is sometimes a contradiction you can’t live with. But sometimes it’s perfectly symbiotic, like the Blur situation.’
Very early on in his career he said, ‘I’m kind of old fashioned in that I like to eat so it’s always good to earn money.’ He does make good money, but he could both make more and keep more than he does. ‘I have been called a sell-out but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want. I think it was easier when I was the underdog, and I had a lot of practice at it,’ he told the New Yorker. ‘The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that’s an easy problem to solve – you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for me.’ He went on, ‘I love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies.’
There is no Banksy Foundation giving away money publicly; it’s all done on a very ad hoc basis, with no ostentation. This makes it completely impossible to give a fair picture of what he gives away. But at one end there is the £1.5 million raised at the New York charity auction. At the other end there are the smaller gifts, like the hand-finished print of Nola (a young girl sheltering from the rain under her umbrella, originally put up in New Orleans to commemorate the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina) which sold for almost £7000 at the annual art auction that Inkie organises to raise funds for a complicated operation for deaf children at Great Ormond Street hospital. It all adds up.
Apart from Voina there was £165,000 for Sightsavers from the release of the print Flag in 2006/7. There was a further £25,000 he raised for Sightsavers in 2008 by organising a raffle at his gallery when he released his new limited edition print Very Little Helps. The tickets cost £1 each with a maximum of twenty per person, and people queued for up to three hours to buy them. This raffle is another good measure of his following, for these were not tickets to win the print but simply to win the right to buy the print. Among the auction of original work, there was the £30,000 raised for Moorfields Eye Hospital and another £30,000 for a drop-in centre for asylum seekers run by the New North London Synagogue.
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.