I don’t know precisely who Banksy is — but I can tell you exactly what he
looks like. Thanks to a fortuitous combination of unwitting tip-offs, I
definitively clocked the famously unidentified graffiti maestro at a house
party in the West country in June.Banksy was at the party with Steve
Lazarides, the charming, extremely driven photographer-turned-gallerist who,
for the past three years or so, has exclusively represented Banksy’s work.
During that time, prices have climbed steadily.
In October 2005, an edition of prints of Kate Moss in the style of Warhol’s
Marilyn Monroe was on sale at his rat-infested Westbourne Grove flat for
£1,500. “At the time we said it was silly money,” a long-term collector told
me last week. “Now they are going through the secondary market for well over
£10,000.” A forthcoming Bonham’s sale called Vision 21
includes a study for Banksy’s Blur album cover, Think Tank,
that he sprayed on a door in Deptford and which was then cut down, I’m told,
by “two pikeys”. Its estimate of £5,000 to £8,000 seems a little low.
Brits are always trying to break America: David Hockney and the Beatles made
it but the vast majority of ambitious transatlantic imports are met with, at
best, a fleeting vogue and at worst humiliating indifference. See Robbie
Williams. I wasn’t convinced that Banksy was going to make it. After all, a
few years ago the only place he was a big name was in the niche milieus of
Soho ad creatives, Hoxton clubbers and British graffiti artists. But he did
it. Last week Banksy cracked the States.
The moment I knew this for sure came on Thursday night, as I stood smoking in
an unsalubrious alley between a rag trade sweatshop and Banksy’s venue, a
rented warehouse not far from LA’s homeless epicentre, Skid Row.
Just then Brangelina — Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the world’s
most-wanted-by- the-tabloids couple, made their entrance. It caused less of
a stir than you might expect. Granted, the ten-strong hit squad of hardened
Los Angeles paparazzi that had followed them here were, despite themselves,
a little excited. Immediately after firing off their shots of the megawatt
couple leaving their hulking black Range Rover, walking across the alleyway
and into the warehouse, one pap, leaning on a dumpster and feverishly
scanning his fresh, very valuable pictures, turned to his partner: “F**k me.
F**k. I just don’t believe they’re here.”
Inside, though, the 150 or so guests kept their cool, registering the couple’s
arrival with involuntary gawps, but then studiously ignoring them. Jude Law,
fresh from a guest spot on the Jay Leno show and still — at least to my eye
— wearing make-up, was already there. And not long after Brangelina’s
arrival, a tousled-haired man wearing a grey T-shirt under a pinstripe suit
walked up to Jo Brooks, Banksy’s British PR who was manning the door, and
said: “Hi. My name’s Keanu. Is my name on the list?”
As you would expect at a party attended by such AAA-listers, the crowd inside,
which swelled to around 700, was made up of the Los Angeles elite.
Musicians, including Meg White, the maniacal drummer from the White Stripes,
mingled with music-industry players, television actors, agents, make-up
artists, and contributors to painfully hip, small-circulation magazines.
What was completely unexpected, though, was that this giddyingly exclusive
in-crowd flocked to see the work of an unnamed bloke from Bristol.
Banksy did not attend (although his girlfriend did) but when he was told of
Brangelina’s presence even he, apparently, was gobsmacked. In only a few
days, Banksy has managed to imprint his name on both the lips of Hollywood’s
brightest young things and the papers and screens of America’s mass media.
Last week’s show was on the front page of The New York Times
and the Los Angeles Times as well as on seven US television news
shows, including ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS News
— it even made al-Jazeera.
This week Banksy’s art will be in every celebrity magazine and supermarket
tabloid, admittedly thanks to the attendance of Brangelina (whose evident
closeness, they will breathlessly report, scotched last week’s rumour that
they were close to separation).
On the three days that it was open after Thursday’s party, the Barely
Legal exhibition was visited every day by approximately 10,000 people
who queued for up to 500 yards to get in to the 800-capacity warehouse at
2476 Hunter Street.
Banksy professes to be unimpressed by Tinseltown’s sparkle. He told me, in a
long-negotiated-for e-mail, that he chose LA for his US solo show because:
“Hollywood is a town where they honour their heroes by writing their names
on the pavement to be walked on by fat people and peed on by dogs. It seemed
like a great place to come and be ambitious.”
However insouciant his posturing, Banksy can’t deny that he’s banked a few
bucks. By the time I left LA and the outer circles of Banksy’s caravanserai
on Friday afternoon, the vast majority of the show’s approximately 50 works,
including canvases, stencils, sculptures, a fridge, two painted trucks, half
a red telephone box, some defaced Paris Hilton CDs in a vitrine teeming with
cockroaches and a blow-up doll dressed as a gasmasked angel, had been sold.
The most expensive piece was a painting that went for about £150,000.
By lurking, drinking and chatting around the sales office, I gleaned the
information that buyers included Christina Aguilera (she bought two), the
hip-hop star Everlast (his painting cost $70,000) and Macaulay Culkin.
Brangelina inquired after eight works and purchased three paintings, so it
is said.
The artist’s new celebrity customers were played down by the artist himself:
when I asked if he relished having famous collectors, Banksy replied: “Not
as much as if the famous collectors were famous for their collections.” To
propagate Banksy’s mystique, his people are purposefully vague about
unromantic topics such as profit.
My estimate is that he made perhaps $3 million from the art and, thanks to a
sell-out edition of six prints (each edition ran to 500 and each one cost
$500), banked another $1.5 million. Apart from Tai, the elegantly painted
elephant, only one work at the show was not for sale: an ornately-framed
painting of a Buckingham Palace guardsman, sword on his shoulder, sitting on
a pantomime horse.
That work was lent by its owner, and Banksy’s friend, Damien Hirst for the
show, which ended on Sunday night. Keanu Reeves, who didn’t buy, seemed
nevertheless transfixed — particularly by Hirst’s loan and a painting of an
idyllic, 18th-century bay full of ships and fishermen to which Banksy added
flying saucers firing lethal-looking, green death-rays. Reeves said he would
“definitely” hang one in his home and added: “I really enjoyed it very much
— and I learnt something tonight. I liked seeing the earlier works next door
and then coming in here and seeing these great, big canvases. It’s great.”
Brad Pitt, standing equidistant from his girlfriend and the 38-year-old Tai,
whose participation (she was daubed every day in soluble, non-toxic red and
silver paint to match the wallpaper in one of the exhibition’s corners)
sparked some censorious press coverage, was equally entranced. “I love
it,” he said. “I think that this guy is really on to something. I first
heard about him a year or so ago — I saw something about him in a magazine.”
What Pitt particularly loves is that “he does all this” (gesturing around the
room) “and he stays anonymous. I think that’s great. These days everyone is
trying to be famous. But he has anonymity.”
This Pitt said wistfully, with Angelina still a few feet away talking to her
assistant and Holly Cushing, the well-connected Englishwoman (she used to
work for Sean Penn) who had spent the past three days in a frenzy of mobile
phone calls fixing the guestlist.
Despite its studiously rough-and-ready aesthetic, last Thursday’s party was
the climax of an operation almost six months in its planning and
preparation. Kari Johnson, Tai’s handler, was first approached “a few months
ago” to see if her entertainment elephant might be available as an exhibit.
(Note: I can assure you that Tai is one of the best-loved pachyderms on the
planet. She eats carrots constantly. She was not being treated cruelly.)
Then local experts scouted out a suitable venue and Cushing whispered early
intelligence of Banksy’s arrival into impeccably connected ears.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, Banksy and his band of assistants were busy
stockpiling and creating art for the show. Much of the work was held up in
US customs, sparking a gut-wrenching scare. It was far too late to cancel
the exhibition; the date was fixed and the stunts, so typical of Banksy,
that foretold it had already begun.
First, a few weeks ago, his team distributed 500 defaced copies of the new
Paris Hilton CD in 42 music stores around the UK — a prank that made
headlines. Then, the Friday before last, Banksy dressed a blow-up doll in
the orange jumpsuit and black hood of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. He deflated
it, stuffed it into a backpack and went for a day out at Disneyland. Inside,
he sat on a bench and quickly unpacked, inflated his unwanted installation
with a pump, and fixed it on some fencing facing a blind corner on the Rocky
Mountain Railroad rollercoaster ride. By the time Disney’s in-house security
team spotted Donald and Mickey’s uninvited new friend, Banksy was long gone,
but a cohort remained to record the reaction for the exhibition.
That stunt, like the paintings he put last year on the Palestine side of the
West Bank barrier of children digging a hole through the wall (which Brad
Pitt told me is his favourite Banksy work), was overtly political. So were
some of the works, that were cleared in customs with hours to spare. Not all
his images are about world events — he also loves lampooning advertising —
but they are the ones that tend to attract glowing notices. As Jude Law said
of Barely Legal late on Thursday night as we all lounged and boozed
around at the after-party by the David Hockney pool of the Hollywood
Roosevelt Hotel: “The great thing about it is that it was so political.
People here need shaking up, they don’t do anything like this here — it’s
fantastic.”
I would guess that politics is only a Banksy sideline. His favourite artists,
he e-mailed me, are The Far Side’s Gary Larson and Harry
Houdini. Houdini, of course, was the conjuror of outrageous illusion, and
Larson is a master of the surreal — both Banksy special subjects.
Last week he stuck to his usual line when explaining his anonymity: “So I can
do my work without being impeded by arrest.” Then he added: “It’s a pretty
safe bet that the reality of me would be a crushing disappointment to a
couple of 15-year-old kids out there.”
Back at that party in June, what I found most telling about observing Banksy
was not his appearance (dark hair, lightly bearded, nice trainers — more I
shall not say) but his behaviour. There were dodgems at this rather opulent
do, and you couldn’t get Banksy off them. While my girlfriend, son and I
waited in the queue we watched as Banksy stayed resolutely in his ride until
three five-minute changeovers had passed. Each time they did, he revved up
afresh, electrically zooming with as much speed as possible into his fellow
drivers. With each juddering impact, he grinned — and then accelerated away
at speed.
They cracked America . . .
Stanley Spencer
The Berkshire-born painter was so esteemed in America that he was awarded an
Honorable Mention at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1933.
Henry Moore
Two of the Yorkshireman’s sculptures were borrowed by MoMA for the “Cubism and
Abstract Art” exhibition in 1934. They later became the first major Moores
in an American collection.
David Hockney
In 1964, the Bradford-born pop-artist had his first American solo exhibition
in New York, exhibiting his California paintings. He received rave reviews.
Damien Hirst
In 2004, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,
better known as the shark, became one of the most expensive works sold by a
living artist when Saatchi sold it to Steve Cohen, an American collector,
for $12 million.
