Banksy: Zorro of the Art World

A secret identity. Of noble character. Working under cover of darkness or deep shadows, he moves silently, defending the people of the land against tyrannical officials and other villains. Too cunning and fox like for the bumbling authorities to catch, he revels in publicly humiliating his foes, and he leaves his "mark" with a slap-dash of humor and a side dish of force-fed humility. That's Banksy. Now, about Zorro. Where Zorro wore a mask, Banksy wears a hoodie. Zorro fought deftly with a rapier. Banksy wields a wicked brush or a can of spray paint. The Spanish colonial era of California was Zorro's domain, and Banksy works the world.

So who is Banksy? That depends on who you ask. He has a gold tooth, or is it silver? Or is that his earring? He travels by chauffeured SUV, or was that him on the subway? He's a very private tee-totaling loner, or he likes to shoot the breeze in pubs while downing pint after pint of stout. He lives in London, or Shoreditch, but used to live in Hoxton...or Chelmsford. He was born in 1978...or 1974, in Bristol...or Yate, the son to a butcher and a housewife...uh, a delivery driver and a hospital worker.

The simple fact is, nobody knows. They make guesses - lots of them - but so far, nobody really knows.

This much is known: Banksy is a "guerrilla" graffiti artist whose graffiti first appeared around 1993 in and near Bristol. By 2001, Banksy's nom de plume had appeared throughout the United Kingdom. Soon, his work began popping up in Vienna, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Paris. This "quality vandal" - as he likes to be called - has clung vociferously to his anonymity to help avoid the police.

"I have no interest in ever coming out," he has said. "I figure there are enough self-opinionated assholes trying to get their ugly little faces in front of you as it is."

What is a blank wall to us is a canvas to Banksy. Armed only with spray paint and cardboard stencils, he's able to achieve a meticulous level of detail in his anti-establishment, whimsical, social commentary cartooning with more graphic bang for your buck. Many of his images feature a rat, Banksy's symbol for himself and all disenfranchised humans, but we've also seen Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, two policeman "snogging", and everything in between.

One morning, Bristol citizens were surprised to find a new mural downtown, directly facing the offices of the Bristol city council. . It depicted a window, a perfect imitation of others nearby. From the sill, a naked man dangled by his fingertips. Inside, a fully dressed man scanned the horizon, next to a woman in dishabille. As it turns out, there was a sexual reproduction clinic in the same building. The city council, in a departure from policy, decided to put the mural's fate to a public vote. Of about a thousand respondents, ninety-three per cent said the mural should stay. So it did.

In an interview conducted by email, Banksy was asked about the mural: "I think because it turned out there was a sexual-health clinic on the other side of the wall helped, which just goes to show-if you paint enough crap in enough places sooner or later one of them will mean something to someone."

Street art is fleeting, however, and so Banksy occasionally releases a book with photos of his work. The first three volumes were self-published, the latest, "Wall and Peace," was published by Random House and has sold more than 250.000 copies. The concept of Banksy making money from his art in not new or surprising. A person has to eat, and for years he has been represented by a London gallery. The gallery owner claims that even he doesn't know what Banksy looks like, and that paintings and money are exchanged "cloak and dagger" style, in back alleys and shadows and intermediaries and disguises. This dichotomy between the street artist "thug" image and the savvy marketing genius will grow with Banksy's rising fame, as we shall see.

His art stunts have become legendary. At London Zoo, Banksy climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted "We're bored of fish" in seven foot high letters, and at Bristol Zoo, one foggy morning a thought bubble in the elephant enclosure read "I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring." But zoos are far from his only target. Museums have also been the recipients of his witty but pointed barbs.

At the Louvre in Paris, Banksy secretly hung a copy of the Mona Lisa with a yellow smiley face. The piece was discovered several hours later and hurriedly removed. At the British Tate Museum, a classical bucolic landscape with a house was painted to appear as though crime scene tape was keeping viewers from the scene, smuggled in and hung by Banksy. It was only discovered when the glue he used to affix it to the wall gave out and the painting crashed to the floor. The venerable British Museum saw a much more elaborate Banksy installation. There, he hung a fake pre-historic art rock depicting a hunter with a spear pushing a shopping cart. The piece hung for three days before being noticed, the card below it reading "This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era." The artist was identified as Banksymus Maximus.

While most of this type of Banksy's art has not survived due to overzealous Museum officials, curators at the British Museum displayed a rare sense of humor, extolling the quality of the installation: "It looked very much in keeping with the other exhibits, the explanatory text was quite similar," commented a museum spokeswoman. And she was obviously tickled when she added, "Banksy said we can keep it." The art rock remains on display today, added to their permanent collection.

Across the big pond, New York's big museums needn't have felt left out. Banksy hit four New York City museums - the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Museum - in a single day. The painting Banksy smuggled into the MoMA was of a cheap brand of British tomato soup, a send-up of Andy Warhol's iconic can of Campbell's.

For the Natural History Museum, it was a taxidermy rat equipped with a miniature can of spray paint. The rat was stuffed and clad in wraparound sunglasses, scaled down to fit its tiny head, a rucksack on its back, and with a microphone in one paw. Above it is sprayed in graffiti-style lettering "our time will come". For Banksus militus vandalus - the name of the rat - the time came several hours later when curators finally noticed it. "He can come and pick it up," one museum official quipped.

But his stinging wit is not without reason: By subverting the established system of art exhibition, Banksy is pointing his poisoned rat finger at their shortcomings. "Art's the last of the great cartels," he contends. "A handful of people make it, a handful buy it, and a handful show it. But the millions of people who go look at it don't have a say."

All of this is not to say that Banksy doesn't execute some truly meaningful art, some of it jarring and shameful, and some of it beautiful and shattering in its poignancy. In 2005, Banksy traveled to the West Bank, where he painted the security fence at Bethlehem with 9 murals. One simply featured a rope-ladder leading up and over the fence, and another a child being lifted over by a handful of helium balloons. Perhaps the most famous of his West Bank murals was a trompe-l'oeil scene of a hole in the concrete barrier, revealing a glittering beach on the other side; it looked as if someone had dug through to paradise.

At Disneyland, he took a blowup doll and dressed it as a Guantanamo prisoner, complete with a hood and orange jumpsuit, handcuffs, and shackles. He installed it along the path of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride, where it remained for ninety minutes until park officials were alerted to its presence.

In London, Banksy cemented into place - without permission - a 20 foot (6 meter) solid bronze statue weighing 3 and a half tons into a central London square overlooking the Old Bailey. The satirical statue - costing £22,000 and presumably paid for by Banksy - depicted the figure of justice as a prostitute with leather boots, a thong, and US dollar bills stuffed into her garter. A plaque reads "Trust No One."

But Banksy wouldn't be Banksy without some pranks that weren't just good fun. For one such stunt, he doctored 500 Paris Hilton CD's by replacing Hilton's picture on the sleeve to show the US socialite topless and with a dog's head, and then replacing the CD with his own remixes with titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done, and What Am I For? He made the switches in 48 record shops across the UK, including Bristol, Brighton, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow and London. He left the original bar code intact so people wouldn't realize it had been doctored. No customers complained or returned a doctored version, according to a spokesperson, adding, "And it might be that there will be some people who agree with his views on the Paris Hilton album." Indeed, at least one copy has been sold on Ebay for Ł750.00.

As his fame has grown, so too the demand for his work. There have been several shows of his art, without Banksy in attendance chatting up potential buyers and sampling cubes of cheese, of course. He isn't needed, as his paintings fetch higher and higher prices, in large part, it could be argued, because of his mystique. The irony is not lost on his detractors, one of who has said, "They don't call him BANKsy for nothing." But Banksy maintains his devil-may-care attitude. Before one such show, he was quoted as saying, "The last time I did a show, I thought I'd got a four-star review, then I realized they said, ‘This is absolute ****."

With this kind of appeal, it could not be long until the auction houses wanted a piece of the Banksy pie. Ralph Taylor, a specialist in the Sotheby's contemporary-art department, said of him, "He is the quickest-growing artist anyone has ever seen of all time." Recently, Sotheby's auctioned off seven pieces of his work. One piece went for $200,000 dollars. A later auction at Bonham's saw a piece sell for $575,000. Responding to the sales, Banksy posted a painting on his website featuring an auctioneer presiding over a crowd of rapt bidders, with the caption "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

Such antagonism goads people, as it is meant to do. He has always had his detractors, whether sour-grape artists or persons in the art world outraged that they are not the ones deciding what is good and what is not, is difficult to ascertain. But it is out there. For a while, the Wikipedia entry for Banksy began, "Banksy is a nancy boy. Banksy is a rip-off. Banksy is a bloody sod."

And still they search for his true identity. According to the London Daily Mail, Banksy is a 34-year-old Bristol native named Robin Gunningham. The paper started with the one known photo of Banksy, taken in Jamaica several years ago, and worked its way back through his hometown and beyond in a year-long investigation. Far from being a radical tearaway from an inner-city, the man the paper has identified as Banksy is, perhaps all too predictably, a former public schoolboy brought up in middle-class suburbia. Or is it? It wouldn't be the first time it was thought Banksy's identity had been rooted out only to be proved wrong..

They will continue to search, to dig like rats into the trash bin of Banksy's life, searching for that one morsel that will sustain them until the next trash bin comes along. It was the same for Zorro. The powerful, the greedy, the cruel, the man, sought to unmask him too, but they never succeeded. Let's hope it is the same for Banksy. We need him. We need someone to say what we feel. One giant flip of the finger to authority gone wild. Once the mask is ripped from his face, our wonder, our awe, our childish delight at his antics will be ripped away as well, and that will be a sad day for the disenfranchised, the down-trodden, and all of humanity. Even the rats might weep.