When he was 18, he once wrote, he was painting a train with a gang of mates when the British Transport Police showed up and everyone ran. The shortened moniker may have demonstrated less of the gangsters’ “robbing banks” cachet, but it was more memorable-and easier to write on a wall.Īround this time, he also settled on his distinctive stencil approach to graffiti. He was trying out names at the time, sometimes signing himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy. “My dad was badly beaten up there as a kid,” he told fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun. So when Banksy, who came from a much leafier part of town, decided to go make his first foray there, he was nervous. Very white-probably no more than three black families had somehow ended up there-working-class, run-down and unwelcoming to strangers. The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. “You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. “There’s a whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell ,” Banksy has maintained. While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a direct connection between an artist and his constituency. His last face-to-face interview took place in 2003. Hiding behind a paper bag, or, more commonly, e-mail, Banksy relentlessly controls his own narrative. Pest Control, the tongue-in-cheek-titled organization set up by the artist to authenticate the real Banksy artwork, also protects him from prying outsiders. And he has moved from graffiti on gritty urban walls to paint on canvas, conceptual sculpture and even film, with the guileful documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Today, he has bombed cities from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Detroit. But they do want to follow his upward trajectory from the outlaw spraying-or, as the argot has it, “bombing”-walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of dollars in the auction houses of Britain and America. Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him). He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head. When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy-graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur-for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga.
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