There are two Banksy websites. www.banksy.co.uk is the one where you will find the biggest selection of his art. When the cry goes up ‘there’s a new Banksy’ then, if it is genuine, it will usually appear on this site a couple of days later although, confusingly, this does not give it authentication. Occasionally a picture of a new piece will appear here before anyone has spotted it.
If you want to buy a Banksy print (good luck) or prints from a list of almost sixty artists who they also sell, then go to www.picturesonwalls.com, Banksy’s online gallery. You can also visit the gallery at 46–48 Commercial Street, London E1 6LT.
Three sites that I used follow Banksy in fine detail, providing a huge amount of useful information if you have time to go through all the posts. The site I probably made most use of is www.UrbanArtAssociation.org. This is the original Banksy Forum site set up in 2006. I also used www.thebanksyforum.com, as well as the Banksy group on flickr: www.flickr.com/groups/banksy. The site www.banksy-prints.com gave a very helpful list of Banksy prints and the prices they were issued at, but this record unfortunately seems to have come to a halt in the middle of 2010. However the site’s founder says it will be fully operational again in 2012.
The one blog I get sent and read every day is Vandalog, which you can find at http://blog.vandalog.com. Founded in 2008 by R.J. Rushmore, who divides his time between London and Philadelphia where he is at university, it is a very good record of what is happening in the street art world and where; there are many things I would have missed but for Vandalog pointing them out. I even bought a couple of T-shirts off this site at Christmas.
On the East Coast the key site is www.woostercollective.com. The founders of the site, Marc and Sara Schiller, have close links to Banksy – his New York museum incursions, for instance, were first announced on this site. Wooster carries street art pictures from around the world but is less newsy than Vandalog. Another New York-based site, http://thestreetspot.com/, concentrates more exclusively on the city. On the West Coast probably the site I used the most was http://melroseandfairfax.blogspot.com – again very useful, although I certainly was not on it every day.
Other sites that I have used regularly include:
Good pictures of all of his exhibitions, photographed exten sively by fans, can be found via Google. One of the best sites for Banksy photographs is http://www.flickr.com/photos/romanywg/. Other flickr sites that Vandalog rates include:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nolionsinengland/ (London),
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunapark/ (New York) and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lord-jim/ (Los Angeles).
Banksy interviews
These are the interviews with Banksy that I used or consulted; it was only while compiling this list that I realised quite how often Banksy goes public, like any other artist, when he thinks he needs to. Some articles are full interviews with him (almost all by email), others include within them some emailed quotes from him. Most are easily found on the web and I will only give exact web references where they take a bit of hunting down. There may be one or two instances where a fake Banksy has crept in but I am sure that the great majority of these interviews are genuine.
‘Banksy (Yes Banksy) on Thierry, EXIT Skepticism & Documentary Filmmaking as Punk, All These Wonderful Things’. A.J. Schnack, http://edendale.typepad.com, 21 December 2010
‘Exclusive: Banksy in his own words’.
Nick Francis, Sun, 4 September 2010. (This is an accurate transcript of the Banksy interview included as one of the extras in Exit Through the Gift Shop, so it is not exactly exclusive, but it is useful.)
Banksy’s first Australian interview. Kylie Northover, The Age, 29 May 2010
‘Banksy Talks Art, Power and Exit Through the Gift Shop’. Nancy Miller, Wired magazine, April 2010
‘Street (il)legal: Q&A with Banksy’. David Fear, Time Out, New York, 12 April 2010
‘Banksy Revealed?’ Shelley Leopold, LA Weekly, 8 April 2010
‘World Exclusive: Banksy’. Ossian Ward, Time Out, 4 March 2010
‘Banksy Woz ’Ere’. Eleanor Mills, Sunday Times Magazine, 28 February 2010
‘Banksy goes home to shake-up Bristol’. Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times, 14 June 2009
‘Breaking the Banksy’. Lee Coan, Mail on Sunday Live magazine, June 2008
‘Banksy was Here. The invisible man of graffiti art’. Lauren Collins, The New Yorker, 14 May 2007
‘Banksy: The Naked Truth’. Interview with Shepard Fairey, Swindle magazine, no. 8, Autumn 2006
‘Banksy hits the big time’. Luke Leitch, The Times, September 2006
‘Beware it’s Banksy’. Roger Gastman, LA Weekly, September 2006
‘Give me Monet, that’s what I want’. Morgan Falconer, The Times, 11 October 2005
‘Art Attack’. Jeff Howe, Wired magazine, August 2005
‘Need talent to exhibit in museums? Not this prankster’. Randy Kennedy, New York Times, March 2005
‘British prankster smuggles art into top NY museums’. Reuters, March 2005
‘Something to spray’. Simon Hattenstone, Guardian, 17 July 2003
‘Banksy, graffiti artist’, Emma Warren, Observer, 26 May 2002
The collection of interviews below can be found through the Urban Art Association, the Banksy Forum or the banksy flickr group and some are on all three sites.
‘Banksy’. Design is Kinky magazine, November 2002
‘Creative Vandalism’. Jim Carey, Squall magazine, 30 May 2002
‘Banksy and Shok1 chatting’. Big Daddy Magazine, issue 7, 2001
There is also a ‘transcript of an interview with Banksy by Squall back in 2001’. This may well be from the short film Banksy, Boom or Bust, Squall Productions for Channel 4, August 2001.
‘Painting and Decorating’. Si Mitchell, Level magazine, June/July 2000
‘The Enemy Within’. Boyd Hill, Hip-Hop Connection, no. 136, April 2000
Radio and television
Santa’s Ghetto in Bethlehem. Paul Wood, BBC Radio 4 PM, Christmas 2007
Interview at the time of the publication of Wall and Piece. Zina Saro-Wiwa, The Culture Show, November 2005
Interview at the time of his incursions into New York’s museums. Michele Norris, National Public Radio, March 2005
Interview before his Severnshed exhibition. Fergus Colville, BBC Radio Bristol, February 2000
Steve Lazarides
‘Urban Renewal’. Andrew Child, Financial Times, 28 January 2011
‘Steve Lazarides: Tunnel visions’. Alice Jones, Independent, 12 October 2010
‘Banksy’s Ex-Gallerist talks about their breakup, Depictions of Hell’. Susan Michals, Vanity Fair Daily, 11 October 2010
‘On the run with London’s bad-boy gallerist’. Michael Slenske, www.artinfo.com, 1 October 2010
‘Steve Lazarides: Graffiti’s Uber-dealer’. Luke Leitch, The Times, 11 July 2009
‘Keeping it real’. Alice O’Keefe, New Statesman, October 2008
‘The Banksy Manager’. Charlotte Eager, ES magazine, November 2007
‘A shop window for outsiders’. Alastair Sooke, Daily Telegraph, August 2007
Exit Through the Gift Shop
‘Ron English Revelations’. Jim Vorel, http://www.heraldre-view.com/blogs/decaturade/article_2217fed0-cf18-11e0-9659-001cc4c002e0.html, 25 August 2011
‘Getting at the truth of Exit Through the Gift Shop’. Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times, 22 February 2011. This was the lengthiest and most detailed interview with Mr Brainwash that I read.
There was a 40-minute interview with the film’s producer, Jamie D’Cruz, and editor, Chris King, which I found on www.viddler.com but which is now not easily accessible.
‘Hyping the “Gift Shop”’. Eric Kohn, www.indiewire.com, 15 November 2010
‘Banksy docu marketers let auds help out’. Caroline Ryder, www.variety.com, 19 June 2010
‘Thierry Guetta is real’. Alex Jablonski, http://sparrowsongs.wordpress.com, 22 April 2010
Shepard Fairey interviewed by WNYC radio about Mr Brainwash and Banksy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiVxOzMFX gw&feature=related, uploaded 21 April 2010
‘Banksy movie boasts strong opening numbers in non-traditional release’. Peter Knegt, www.indiewire.com, 19 April 2010. Also on the same website by the same writer: ‘Exit strategy: Bringing Banksy to the Masses’, 7 April 2010
‘Moment of truth: Banksy is selling, but are you buying?’ S.T. Vanairsdale, www.movieline.com, 15 April 2010
‘Is Banksy’s Mr Brainwash an Art-World Borat?’ Logan Hill, New York magazine, 14 April 2010
‘Riddle? Yes. Enigma? Sure. Documentary?’ Melena Ryzik, New York Times, 13 April 2010
‘Here’s why the Banksy movie is a Banksy prank’. Alissa Walker, www.fastcompany.com, April 2010
‘Exit Through the Gift Shop: The enigma known as Banksy’. Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times, 30 March 2010
‘The latest Banksy Hoax? A real artist’. Tom Shone, The Times, 27 February 2010
‘Brainwashed’. Andrew Russeth, www.artinfo.com, 16 February 2010
‘Shepard Fairey speaks at Bonhams and Butterfields Panel’, 5 November 2008. On YouTube. There are different segments of this discussion; Fairey speaking about Mr Brainwash comes halfway through a video which is 10 min, 10 sec. long.
‘Mr Brainwash Bombs LA’. Shelley Leopold, LA Weekly, 11 June 2008
‘Featured Artist – Mr Brainwash’. www.neublack.com, June 2008. Short interview with Mr Brainwash, pictures of the show followed by a long interesting discussion on his art.
The news of Glen Friedman’s case against Mr Brainwash was first broken on www.hollywoodreporter.com. Sean Bonner at www.boingboing.net supported Friedman, while RJ – ‘Mr. Brainwash is getting his ass sued’ – came to the defence of Mr Brainwash at http://blog.vandalog.com. The whole question of appropriation or ‘referencing’ of images was covered at www.theartnewspaper.com in March 2011. Also: ‘Obey plagiarist Shepard Fairey’. Mark Vallen, http://www.art-for-a-change.com, December 2007.
Derek Walborn at www.derekwalborn.com is the sculptor employed by Mr Brainwash who answered my questions about what he did and did not produce for Mr Brainwash.
Incursions
‘A Wooster Exclusive: Banksy Hits New York’s Most Famous Museums’. www.wooster.collective.com, 23 March 2005
‘Graffiti artist cuts out middle man to get his work hanging in the Tate’. Steven Morris, www.guardian.co.uk, 18 October 2003
‘Street artist Banksy dons disguise to install his picture on gallery wall’. Arifa Akbar, www.independent.co.uk, 18 October 2003
Bristol show
‘Banksy charged Bristol Museum £1, contract papers reveal’. www.culture24.org.uk, 14 August 2009
‘Banksy vs Bristol Museum’, review. http://martinworster.wordpress.com, 2 July 2009
‘Banksy takes over the Bristol City Museum’. Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times, 21 June 2009
‘Banksy: The graffitist goes straight’. Tim Adams, Observer, 14 June 2009
‘Banksy comes home for Bristol show’. www.thisisbristol.co.uk, 12 June 2009
Banksy Souvenir Supplement, Evening Post, 2 September 2009
Bristol City Council graffiti policy can be found at: http://www.bristol.gov.uk
Robbo
Graffiti Wars, Channel 4, 14 August 2011 (see also ‘Banksy accuses Channel 4 film of distortion over “war of the walls”’. Dalya Alberge, www.guardian.co.uk, 3 September 2011)
‘The gloves are off: Graffiti legend King Robbo has resurfaced to settle a score with Banksy’. Matilda Battersby, www.independent.co.uk, 21 April 2011
‘Banksy graffiti feud given a fresh coat’. Alexandra Topping, www.guardian.co.uk, 23 April 2010
‘A game of tag breaks out between London’s graffiti elite’. Gabriele Steinhauser, http://online.wsj, 3 March 2010
‘Banksy’s rival King Robbo sprays the final word in street art feud’. Fiona Hamilton, www.timesonline.co.uk, 30 December 2009
Reviews/critics
‘The death of Banksy’. http://blog.vandalog.com/2011/01/the-death-of-banksy/. An interesting discussion on whether, given Banksy’s anonymity, his art could continue without him.
‘The strengths and limitations of Banksy’s “guerrilla” art’. Paul Mitchell, www.wsws.org, 10 September 2009
‘Should Banksy be nominated for the Turner prize?’ Jonathan Jones, www.guardian.co.uk, 15 April 2009
‘Banksy’s ideas have the value of a joke’. Matthew Collings, The Times, 28 January 2008
‘Banksy’s Progress’. Waldemar Januszczak, Sunday Times, http://timesonline.co.uk, 11 March 2007
‘Best of British’. Jonathan Jones, www.guardian.co.uk, 5 July 2007
‘Why all the fuss over Banksy?’ Jonathan Jones, www.guardian.co.uk, March 2007
‘When graffiti crosses that fine line’. Charles Schultz, http://whitehotmagazine.com, March 2007
‘The Banksy Effect’. Marc Schiller, www.woostercollective.com, 13 February 2007
Followed by ‘Marc Schiller on Commerce’, www.papermag.com, 10 October 2008
‘Supposing . . . subversive genius Banksy is actually rubbish’. Charlie Brooker, www.guardian.co.uk, 22 September 2006
‘Art: Who’s afraid of the big bad guy? Is art vandal Banksy mellowing with age?’ Waldemar Januszczak, http://times online.co.uk, 23 October 2005
MOCA
‘Radical graffiti chic’. Heather MacDonald, http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_2_vandalism.html, Spring 2011
‘A risk-taker’s debut’. Guy Trebay, www.nytimes.com, 22 April 2011
‘Art in the Streets’, review. Mat Gleason, http://coagula.com, 15 April 2011
‘Street art at Moca’. Shelley Leopold, http://www.laweekly.com, 7 April 2011
‘Tag He’s It’. Steffie Nelson, www.nytimes.com, 11 March 2011
Walls
‘555 Gallery gets OK to display Banksy mural’. Mark Stryker, http://www.freep.com/article/20110911/ENT05/109110402/, 10 September 2011
‘Galleries defend controversial Banksy show’. Rachel Corbett, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/corbett/keszler-gallery-on-banksy-controversy-9-1-11.asp, 31 August 2011
‘Banksy fans decry removal of street art works from Palestine’. http://www.artnet.com/ magazineus/news/artnetnews/banksy-palestinian-works.asp, 30 August 2011
A film about Banksy walls being transported from Bethlehem to New York via London was put up by the Keszler Gallery on YouTube in August 2011. See: Banksy Keszler.mov.
The website carrying an impassioned debate about whether the Detroit Banksy should have been ‘saved’ is http://www.detroitfunk.com
‘Did Banksy’s latest work bring misery to a homeless man?’ Guy Adams, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/, 19 March 2011
‘Remove art from its architectural context, and what’s left?’ Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times architecture critic, http://articles.latimes.com, 12 March 2011
‘Graffiti artist Banksy leaves mark on Detroit and ignites firestorm’. Mark Stryker, http://www.freep.com, 15 May 2010
‘Banksy’s Wall’. Channel 4 News, February 2010. A nine-minute film about the wall in Croydon. This can be found on various different sites. I used http://www.artisan-pictures.co.uk/and then clicked on films
‘Entire Banksy mural removed by Croydon-Beddington wall’s owner’. Leanne Fender, http://www.suttonguardian.co.uk, 11 November 2009
‘Banksy’s art found on farm’s barn wall’. Charles Heslett, http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk, 3 October 2008
‘Vermin on the loose’. Simon Todd, www.artnet.com, September 2008
‘All the way to the Banksy. A piece of art made by Banksy for the Observer Music Monthly could fetch a tidy sum this week’. Caspar Llewellyn Smith, Observer, 22 June 2008
‘Victim of the Great Banksy Robbery’. Rashid Razaq and Esther Walker, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk, 8 March 2007
Art general
‘The problem with authenticating Warhol’. Charlotte Burns, www.theartnewspaper.com, 7 November 2011
‘Off the Wall. Graffiti has made the transition from vandalism to fashionable art, but how did the street become domesticated’. Victoria Maw, Financial Times, 15 July 2011
‘I’m proud to be a Twombly cultist’. John Waters, The Times, 9 July 2011
‘Graffiti of the Gods. Amid the squiggles Cy Twombly, who died this week, created profound art’. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times, 6 July 2011
‘Beyond Graffiti. A new generation is making street art that is conceptual, abstract, and even sculptural in nature’. Carolina A. Miranda, www.artnews.com, January 2011
‘The Thing is Dave, Giving is an art. But not that sort of art’. Catherine Bennett, Observer, 25 July 2010
‘It was a stunning work of art – so why is the Wall hanging in a Las Vegas loo?’ Germaine Greer, Guardian, 15 February 2010
‘Top of the Pops. Did Andy Warhol change everything?’ The New Yorker, 11 January 2010
‘My Week: Richard Wright. The better the picture, the more I long to destroy it’. Sunday Times, 13 December 2009
‘All that glitters is not sold in this glimmering world’. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times, 8 December 2009
‘The medium is the market’. Hal Foster, London Review of Books, 9 October 2008 ‘How the Tate got streetwise’. Alice Fisher, Observer, 11 May 2008
Art and fashion
‘Richard Hambleton pop-up show @ The Dairy, London’. Patrick Nguyen, Arrested Motion, 6 December 2010
‘Terms of Engagement’. Lucia van der Post, Financial Times, 27 February 2010
Voina
‘How Banksy bailed out Russian graffiti artists Voina’. Lucy Ash, www.bbc.co.uk, 5 March 2011
‘Banksy supports Voina, controversial Russian art group’. Lucy Ash, www.bbc.co.uk, 13 December 2010
‘Banksy pledges cash to Russian art “hooligans”’. Tom Parfitt, Guardian, 13 December 2010
A website in support of Voina: http://en.free-voina.org/
Israel
‘Art attack’. Peter Kennard, http://wwwnewstatesman.com, 17 July 2008
‘Santa’s Ghetto Bethlehem’. www.tristanmanco.com, 1 January 2008
Prices
For prices I used http://artnet.com and sometimes http://www.arcadja.com. Late in the day I also learned of another site: http://expressobeans.com/, a ‘not-for-profit community resource’ tracking prices.
‘When the bottom fell out of the market’. Charlotte Higgins, www.guardian.co.uk, 15 October 2009
‘Quick Fix. Laughing all the way to the Banksy’. www.economist.com, 10 November 2008
Fake Banksys and dodgy Banksys
‘When can we stop wondering what Banksy looks like?’ Adam Clark Estes, www.salon.com, 4 March 2011
‘Suspended sentence for two men who sold fake Banksy prints’. http://cms.met.police.uk, 1 July 2010
‘Croydon Banksy forger avoids jail term for selling fake prints’. Mike Didymus, www.croydonguardian.co.uk, 1 July 2010
‘Revealed: the ebay Banksy print fraud’. William Oliver and Cristina Ruiz, www.theartnewspaper.com, 25 September 2007
Knitting and crocheting
‘Wool Britannia’. Maddy Costa, Guardian, 11 October 2010
Interview with street crochet artist Olek, showing just how dedicated she is to her work. http://www.streetartnews.net/2010_12_01_archive.html, 31 December 2010. Olek’s website is: http://agataolek.com/home.html
Galleries
David Samuel, my guide around Leake Street, has his own online gallery: www.rarekindlondon.com, which has now developed into an illustration agency.
My thanks to Matthew Rich, the dedicated printer at Jealous Gallery in Crouch End who very patiently spent an afternoon showing me how screen printing worked: www.jealousgallery.com
Other galleries that were helpful in one
way or another:
Miscellany
The Shepard Fairey equivalent of the Banksy forum is http://www.thegiant.org/. Another magazine that covers street art and graffiti among other things is http://www.juxtapoz.com/.
Evan Schiff, who waited all night for his Banksy print, is at http://artonanisland.blogspot.com
‘Fashion’s most wanted – Mrs Jones interview’. Christina Lindsay, http://fashionsmostwanted.blogspot.com/2010/09/fashionss-most-wanted-mrs-jones.html, 3 September 2010
‘Want to be famous? Then better stay anonymous’. Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph, 20 August 2010
The interview where Blek le Rat was slightly more critical of Banksy than usual was on a San Francisco arts website: http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php?id=1056&option=com_content &task=view
Interview with Inkie. Roly Henry, www.kmag.co.uk, 7 July 2010
‘On the Foundry: Not all art is meant to last for ever’. Nosheen Iqbal, www.guardian.co.uk, 12 February 2010
‘Banksy and a tunnel vision’. Louise Jury, thisislondon.co.uk, 2 May 2008
For a short video of Banksy’s printer in America getting a little frustrated about Banksy’s concept of keeping a deadline, see: http://printingbanksy.com/
For a slide show of art at the Carlton Arms hotel go to: http://travel.guardian.co.uk/flash/page/0,,2258955,00.html
An interview with John Ogren, general manager of the Carlton Arms Hotel, can be found at www.nypress.com
‘Tag we’re it’. Geoff Edgers, Boston Globe, 15 May 2010, for the reaction of Boston to Banksy and Shepard Fairey’s remarks about Banksy using assistants
A site attempting to have a laugh at Banksy’s expense: http://notbanksy.co.uk
‘Spray it loud’, Dom Phillips, Venue magazine, May 1990, for the early days at Barton Hill
The website of the sculptor who has worked for Banksy: http://www.charliebecker.net/site/category/news/
Late in the day I was recommended this site for the harder edge of graffiti: http://hurtyoubad.com/
The website of the firm employed by Banksy to paint four huge billboards in New York: http://colossalmedia.com/case-studies/ banksy
Figures for the impact of the Banksy exhibition on Bristol were provided by Destination Bristol at http://visitbristol.co.uk/site/destination-bristol
For a film of See No Evil in Bristol, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Mqeqg4guc