“The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the young, bright, creative people, leaving us with only the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”
– Banksy
For those who don’t know Banksy’s work, he is a graffiti artist, and so much more. He is an anti-hero, the working class’s comic messenger. His images are a response to one-sided conversations, screaming back at the forces he feels scream at us. His aim is to offer free art to the every-man, or, at the very least, bring a smile to the downtrodden middle-class commuters, those who work in an office box, shuffling papers, who go home to microwave dinners and bad TV crime dramas, sleep alone and repeat the process. For them, he traipses on bridge ledges and city rooftops at night, giving them a voice of dissent and making them laugh at the same time. Yet, as Banksy’s images have grown famous, the subject of his work can be seen as a topic of potential contradiction. When Angelina Jolie drops close to half a million on your art show’s opening night in an obscure Los Angeles warehouse, and in London you’re represented at Sotheby’s auction house at their Contemporary Evening Sale (the Holy Grail for a living artist), how does someone whose reputation was built on being a street urchin graffiti artist maintain integrity?
In April 2009, I was fortunate enough to have a brief telephone conversation with Banksy. A friend of mine who runs a New York and Los Angeles gallery dubbed in the press as “alternative” put me through to him. Banksy would speak to me only on the condition that the call go through the gallery. Even though I trusted my friend, I was dubious that I would get the real Banksy. In the past, English weeklies like NME (New Music Express, a paper showcasing contemporary Britpop) or glossy magazines like The Face have had two hour interviews with someone claiming to be the elusive street artist allegedly from Bristol, only to eventually discover they were actually talking to Q-Bert from Leeds or the tagger Spilly from Liverpool. I was pretty sure I got the right guy, though, when during the three-way conversation my gallery friend accidentally referred to Banksy by his birth name and Banksy became severely irate. “You fookin’ ping-pong piddly tosser!” he said. “Think man, Think! Use yer fookin’ melon!”
I asked Banksy what he thought about his work being bought up en masse by the likes of Brad Pitt, and after a pause he said, “Nahh, it’s alright, I liked Fight Club.” And said he had no problem with sales to celebrities, as they generally can afford premium sums, and that gets him back on the road. Banksy is not building a nest egg per se to get a big country house; the lion’s share of his earnings from original paintings, prints, and stencil works go to his true passion: creating outdoor street art. Money allows him to travel to cultural hot spots that he feels could use a visual face-lift, such as post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans, the Barcelona Zoo, or the segregation wall separating Palestine from Israel.
Banksy says his greatest fear was being picked up by Iraqi-born advertising mogul Charles Saatchi. Mr. Saatchi formed an advertising firm that was the largest in the world for over a decade, and has built up a massive collection of modern and contemporary British art. Banksy referred to him as a sham of a collector who pretends to benefit young British artists (dubbed ‘YBA’s), and is nothing more than a “moneyed twat.” The root of his loathing is the fact Saatchi is an incredibly successful advertiser. Banksy feels the real visual poison, the true defacement of urban areas or neighborhoods is not executed by graffiti artists, rather large corporations that thrust their products upon you unsolicited, via billboards, television, etc. That these are one-way conversations where organizations use media to make the average public viewer feel insignificant without possessing their products, feeding on feelings such as the smugness an Escalade owner gets at a red light looking to the Ford Focus in the next lane.
At the same time, he feels that art galleries and museums are no different. He dubs modern art “a disaster area.” In the art world there are essentially two schools of thought about representational works: that presenting an image realistically is a talented shortcut to thinking, or that abstract art is for those who can’t draw. There’s also the separation of high and low art; graffiti versus oil painting, for example, and very few have crossed the barriers. Banksy, however, is one of those few. Still, he believes that contemporary art galleries distance themselves from the everyday “ill-arterate” viewer, and that there is a feeling when you come off the street into a gallery with a quaffed model-ish receptionist, if you’re to be at all a somebody, you had better understand the current jargon that goeas along with what you’re looking at, and he is disgusted with this notion. In the 2005 collection of his work Wall and Piece, Banksy writes:
Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions and buy records by the billions. We the people, affect the making and the quality of most of our culture, but not our art.
The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.
So in March of 2005, Banksy entered the museum world—literally. Disguised in beard and hat, he hung his own parodied works in four New York museums as surreptitiously as he would paint a bridge. Often in museum-appropriate gilded frames, his exquisitely altered pieces lasted in public view for various amounts of time ranging from 2 hours to twelve days. One piece, a faux primitive drawing on stone accompanied by a didactic panel noting its origins from the “Post-Catatonic Era” is now in the permanent collection of the British Museum in London.
His anonymity could be considered a Robin Hood sensibility; while it makes perfect sense to remain veritably unknown for legal reasons, it adds to the romanticism surrounding this person known as Banksy. I mused about this, wondering what, with his success and skyrocketing fame, an officer of the law would do today seeing Banksy putting up a piece in the middle of the night. Would he make the arrest and expose a national icon? Move on for the sake of the arts? Or keep moving and come back at dawn with a chisel, and sell the piece at auction? In one case, in February of 2007, the owners of a house in Bristol with a Banksy mural on an outside wall refused an offer because the potential buyers might remove the mural. The owners withdrew the original sale description and changed the market listing to “A Banksy mural with a house attached to it.”
Debating whether Banksy would be charged today as a criminal if revealed to the general public, I asked an obvious question: Had he ever been arrested? “Yes,” he said. “Multiple times.” Apparently, in the early 1990’s, he used to be the bane of Bristol. Beyond being wanted by the local Constable, he was on file with Scotland Yard, an acknowledgment not generally given to street artists. But now that he’s reached financial success, he said, spotters can help him elude police, whereas in the early days when he was alone or with just a few friends, he would have to use creative methods of not being identified as Banksy if he was caught by the police. Since he was equated with a certain style of stencil works on walls, he would have an alternate backpack stashed away from where he was working that he could switch in a foot pursuit. This second backpack would be filled with stencils that looked like they were cut out by “an alcoholic with Down’s syndrome.” So if he were taken to the police station with his materials from the second pack, he’d be booked as a pathetic kid, a wannabe of his notorious pseudonym.
I asked if he was ever planning on revealing himself. “No,” he said. “Absolutely not. Never if I can help it.” I went on to say that was mighty virtuous of him to stay away from the limelight. He said virtue had little to do with it, he knows a lot of street artists look up to him, and he’d “hate for them to find out he was just a scrawny guy with shitty teeth.” I told him a sociology professor of mine told me the most important thing a citizen can do is to participate in their society, and asked him if he thought that was what he was doing. He said, “Yeah, I participate in society, I just happen to do it in dark clothing at 3:30 in the morning.” Opinion seems genuinely irrelevant to him as he is, like all great artists, primarily concerned with the process over the outcome of his work. The planning to climb through a drain pipe or along a thin bridge ledge above a highway is as much a part of the work as the finished image. That his work is now embraced by the celebrity class and the self-important high art world, as well as the middle-class everybodies, has more to do with faulty assertions that art should fall into current fad-like definitions than it does any ideological contradiction. On his reputation, Banksy has been quoted as saying, “People either love me or they hate me, or they don’t really care.” And, really, isn’t that the sum of any passionate endeavor?
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Edited by our own Paul Madonna.
20 responses
Amen, brother.
I think that if Banksy were seen at work by the average cop, he’d be arrested. Some of my best friends and greatest mentors are cops, some of my professional clients are cops, and I have nothing in particular against them, but one must realize; They’re cops. These aren’t guys who for the most part would know a Banksy from a Bullwinkle, and don’t care to.
That is true of a lot of the “common man” for whom he supposedly speaks or at least speaks to, but so it goes – Cest la guerre.
Everything Banksy and this writer say about the nature of art, and commercialization/advertising, is true. True, up to the point that what Banksy does makes it not true (a point at which many of us, artists, make it not true).
The thing that is clear here though unspoken (and perhaps it really should be spoken), is that we have a choice in the art we participate in. Or look at, or create, if you’re someone who doesn’t believe all art is participatory like I do.
We have choices in what we seek out, what we create, what we fill our spaces with, what is of personal interest to us – We choose what we let actually affect our lives or give us meaning. The advertising, the taste of the handful of millionaires, can only truly shape our lives if we let it.
Or again, maybe its just me. I come from a culture of chainsawing billboards.
Cool piece… Always like seeing Banksy’s work.
Oooh, thank you for posting this. I’m fully obsessed with Banksy! He is so inspiring. Also: “fookin’ ping-pong piddly tosser”…I’ll have to remember that one.
I LOVE the TV coming out of the window graffiti! Especially, because, ironically, a character in a story that I started writing today, throws a TV out a window! The picture is now my desktop background.
Great work, Billy!!!
Great article. I’ve been following his work for years and it’s always enlightening, funny, and on the mark. He’s been a big influence on my work, an inspiration to keep pushing it, to put your work out there.
When Banksy speaks we listen
I sympathize wholly with Banksy’s comments on advertising and marketing. My own thought is that much of the reason for creative people moving toward advertising is the constant ethical self-questioning that goes along with being an artist. Success in art comes with the baggage of whether you’re selling out or what have you. If one desires success without that moralizing aspect, advertising is an appealing option. I appreciate Banksy, who often bears the brunt of such attacks, helping us see how this makes the art-world increasingly more exclusive, and the world increasingly less artful, both of which are a shame.
Banksy ,before he was paid mega bucks ,was at one point a regular fella,so i can understand why he wants to remain anonymous,but there are a few people who have actually seen him.
One for sure has,and that’s the Australian Artist James DeWeaver,though reclusive he did respond to an e-mail i sent. Banksy and he did the Gumball 3000 in 2008,photographed by Mick Rock in China,where Banksy did eleven yet undiscovered stencils apparently($6.ooo.ooo worth).They have known each other for about ten years now, both posed for Spencer Tunick in 2000,when DeWeaver invited Tunick to Byron Bay,Australia ,The Arts Factory Lodge to be specific for a photo shoot,as Tunick,Banksy and DeWeaver were all unknowns back then!(This photo is on DeWeaver’s website), Banksy stenciled a parachuting rat with a clothes peg on its nose there,later removed by owners,once they found where it was, who did it,and its value,go figure!
This work is just dumb. Is that all it takes to make people excited? Mildly funny cartoons posted in public places? Banksy is a hell of a hype artist and con artist , I’ll give him that. I like the part about how he only needs the $ to keep traveling and doing street art. Jesus , the press will just repeat any old bullshit he spouts out.
This is art for idiots. Art should be more than a cheap gimmick, or a one-liner joke. It is not easy to create something beautiful that will stand the test of time. Banksy is a product of the short attention span celebrity culture he professes to oppose. What’s wrong with learning something in order to appreciate art? Lots of things can take a little effort to get; jazz, serious novels, experimental music , poetry. Are we just throwing everything out the window that can’t be understood in 30 seconds by anyone who sees it? No wonder hollywood people love Banksy, they have the exact same mentality.
It’s no surprise that he thinks the most talented people go into advertising, as his work is advertising for BANKSY , the brand name.
BANKSY. Genius. Artistic visionary. The point is, someone has to see and react to your art or there is no point. For the idiot above with the message that criticizes the rest of us who are artists and who make our living this way, I just want to tell the world to disregard palmtree’s comment
(stupid name by the way, trees by their nature just are exciting now are they?) What right have you to suggest your opinion is more enlightened than my work mate? That’s what BANKSY would say. He would then just stare blankly into the future, knowing he has shaped the common opinions of all who experienced his art. That’s where the power is for the artist you know. It’s hidden in the timeless truth that all art derives it’s lasting value from the number of people from which it solicits a reaction. Even if that reaction is brief, it still counts because that was the purpose of the art. To just get somebody to feel something about what the artist was trying to say. BANKSY is the Master of this. His images evoke feelings, with no concern whether they be positive of negative. Art is life, cherish that beauty. Never be like the palmtree commenter above. Senseless is never attractive and art with the power of BANKSYS transcends time, class and space.
Artistic visionary?! That kind of stencil art is oooooold. The themes and the styles are ooooooold. He just made it popular.
I like his works, but they don’t seem so trascendental to me. Would love there to be more Banksy all over the world. But wouldn’t pay more than 50 bucks for some of his things.
I believe Style Wars is the best documentary ever about Art and Politics. It documents New York City’s war against graffiti in the early 1980’s – but mostly from the graffiti writers’ perspective! Of course there was great graffiti art on the trains then, but what is interesting is that it was mostly kids doing art for… free! But the city’s reaction and the world’s reaction is truly classic. This documentary gives you so much to think about on so many levels I don’t think there is a better art documentary made in the 20th century.
Here’s the link to the site, http://www.stylewars.com and here’s a link to the full movie for free… http://stylewars.com/index.php?page=video
I want to second the motion of Style Wars in relation to ephemeral urban art. In terms of graffiti art, the “taggers” are doing something quite different from Banksy. For example, the tagger is getting into the basic form of lettering and communication, whereas Banksy is making more of a commercial commentary which ultimately feeds this sort of “war system” based on corporate take-over of resources and ultimately downgrading the product taken over so it is a ghost of its usefulness.
I don’t like him. He’s no better than these scab artists that run around tagging on everything they can find. On top of the fact that he’s breaking the law when he creates his art, he is also a walking contradiction. Bansky is a trust fund kid that lives the type of life that his artwork clearly depicts as evil. I don’t find anything he’s done clever.
Hello, My name is Lori Fry…well now Larson. My Mom was a teacher at St. Teresa’s in Carson City Nevada during the 1970’s. She always talks about a “Billy Bliss” If you attendend this school in the late 1970’s could you please email me so I can have her send you an email? Lori
Is this response late enough? Yes, It’s me.
I used to try to make public art so people with short attention spans would understand what I was trying to say as painting landscapes seemed better off left to those with more skill and patience than I had. After a friend showed me Banksy I immediately quit making art for public consumption as it too seems better left for those who are more clever and proficient than I’ll ever be. With that area covered I have switched my attention to night time fishing for Striped Bass and I am still waiting for Billy Bliss to interview me about that.
Ah, Carson City in the ’70s, who could forget? I spent my afternoons ditching school from St. Teresa’s to play cowboy, but I will tell you, Lori, your mother, always gave me special tutoring after class. If she’s interested in a reunion, so am I! Please post some contact info so we can make this happen.
Hey wait a minute Billy Bliss! You’re supposed to be dead! I was hoping you were playing a joke on everyone. You were supposed to call me back but didn’t. Then our friends tell me you had too much to drink and died. You better call me M—–F——.
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