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08 Apr 14
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Banksy has parlayed his knack for reducing ideas to simple visual elements into what a critic recently termed “red nose rebellion.”
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At a London antiwar demonstration in 2003, he distributed signs that read “I Don’t Believe In Anything. I’m Just Here for the Violence.”
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he produced revisionist oil paintings (Mona Lisa with a yellow smiley face, a pastoral landscape surrounded by crime-scene tape) and, disguised in a trenchcoat and fake beard, installed them, respectively, in the Louvre and the Tate.
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For the Natural History Museum, it was Banksus militus vandalus, a taxidermy rat equipped with a miniature can of spray paint.
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In 2005, Banksy travelled to the West Bank, where he painted the security fence at Bethlehem with 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.
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Banksy sometimes satirizes even his own sanctimony.
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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.”
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“The art world is the biggest joke going,” he has said. “It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.” Although he once declared that “every other type of art compared to graffiti is a step down,” in recent years he has produced his share of traditional works on canvas and on paper, suitable for hanging indoors, above a couch.
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Clean & Green is charged with cleaning up graffiti blight, which costs the city more than three hundred thousand dollars each yea
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12 Feb 14
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uren Collins May 14, 200
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05 Feb 14
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he occasionally issues books filled with photographs of his work, accompanied by his own text. He self-published his first three volumes, “Existencilism,” “Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall,” and “Cut It Out.” His latest, “Wall and Piece,” was published by Random House and has sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies.
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We are concerned that Banksy’s street art glorifies what is essentially vandalism,”
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animal-rights activists were registering their displeasure.
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a city contractor had tried to destroy the mural.
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03 Feb 14
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Banksy is a household name in England—the Evening Standard has mentioned him thirty-eight times in the past six months—but his identity is a subject of febrile speculation. This much is certain: around 1993, his graffiti began appearing on trains and walls around Bristol; by 2001, his
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gnature had cropped up all over the United Kingdom, eliciting both civic hand-wringing and c
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pranksterism and more traditional painting, but Banksy has never shed the graffitist’s habit of operating under a handle. His anonymity is said to be born of a desire—understandable enou
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For years now, he has refused to do face-to-face interviews.
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By Saturday, Los Angeles’s many animal-rights activists were registering their displeasure. Banksy was displaying an eight-thousand-pound elephant named Tai, whose hide he had painted red and embellished with gold fleurs-de-lis, to match the wallpaper of a parlor he had constructed. (The elephant in the room, a handout proclaimed, was global poverty.)
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T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much already, that they are
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He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England
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around 1993, his graffiti began appearing on trains and walls around Bristol; by 2001, his blocky spray-painted signature had cropped up all over the United Kingdom,
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Banksy is able to achieve a meticulous level of detail
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“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.”
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“He is the quickest-growing artist anyone has ever seen of all time.”
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Banksy’s first formal exhibition was in 2000, at a Bristol restaurant whose owners he knew
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The British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold t
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silver
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Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers.
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he British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained.
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he British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained
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He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yat
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For a while now, Banksy has lived in London
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Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much already, that they are covered with smudges of white paint.
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The creative fields have long had their shadowy practitioners, figures whose identities, whether because of scandalous content
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Banksy, for instance, does not attend his own openings.
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Banksy is a household name in England—the Evening Standard has mentioned him thirty-eight times in the past six months
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around 1993, his graffiti began appearing on trains and walls around Bristol; by 2001,
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His anonymity is said to be born of a desire—understandable enough for a “quality vandal,” as he likes to be called—to elude the police. For years now, he has refused to do face-to-face interviews.
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Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, two policemen kissing, a military helicopter crowned by a pink bow. Typically crafting his images with spray paint and cardboard stencils, Banksy is able to achieve a meticulous level of detail.
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He self-published his first three volumes, “Existencilism,” “Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall,” and “Cut It Out.” His latest, “Wall and Piece,” was published by Random House and has sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies.
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At a London antiwar demonstration in 2003, he distributed signs that read “I Don’t Believe In Anything. I’m Just Here for the Violence.”
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Whoever he is, Banksy revels in the incongruities of his persona. “The art world is the biggest joke going,”
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“every other type of art compared to graffiti is a step down,”
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in recent years he has produced his share of traditional works on canvas and on paper, suitable for hanging indoors, above a couch.
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Such antagonism goads people, as it is designed to. For a while, the Wikipedia entry for Banksy began, “Banksy is a nancy boy. Banksy is a rip-off. Banksy is a bloody sod.” Diane Shakespeare, an official with the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, told me, “We are concerned that Banksy’s street art glorifies what is essentially vandalism,”
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nksy’s first formal exhibition was in 2000, at a Bristol restauran
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leasing crowds, not cognoscenti, however, remains his stated aim. “The last time I did a show,” he said, before the Los Angeles opening last September, “I thought I’d got a four-star review, then I realized they said, ‘This is absolute ****.’ ” He elaborated: “Hollywood is a town where they honor 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.”
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By Sunday, thirty thousand people, waiting in lines five blocks long, had seen the exhibition.
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“He’s too much of a pussy to protest having his picture taken once he found himself in Kingston, Jamaica—nowhere near the nice, safe media offices . . . that he’s accustomed to,”
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Colin Saysell, an anti-graffiti officer in Bristol, who has been tracking Banksy for years, concluded that the photos were legit. So did Simon Hattenstone, a writer at the
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Banksy. “He was the grimiest person I’d ever met,” she said. “He looked like someone from one of those British industrial towns from the nineteenth century. There was a layer of grit on him.”
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Peregrine Hill and Dan Mitchell, partners in a London law firm, were among those on the sidewalk. Worried that the show would sell out before they got there, they had cut out of work. They were dressed in suits and ties and had come armed with a P.D.A. and a computer printout.
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anti-graffiti officer, explained that graffiti had first appeared in the U.K. around the same time as the Rock Steady Crew, the Bronx hip-hop group, in 1983. “They went on a European tour and brought with them a number of very famous graf writers from New York as a fringe act,”
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Since 2003, it’s been going crazy again.”
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Municipal lawmakers are not the only Bristolians to have taken a faddish interest in Banksy: in a run-down part of town called Easton, where Banksy is rumored to have lived in the nineties, a couple named Sarah and David Anslow were trying, on behalf of an “anonymous party,” to sell one of his early murals. The mural, which is spray-painted freehand, with bubble letters and looping “wild-style” arrows, and bears less resemblance to Banksy’s recent work than to something you might see on a PATH train, adorns an exterior wall of a crumbling Victorian terrace house. For a minimum bid of four hundred thousand dollars, a buyer would receive the mural—with the house thrown in “for free.”
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a few days earlier, a city contractor had tried to destroy the mural.
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Andipa does not represent any artists, so all his shows are privately sourced. “At first, we had Banksy followers, if you like, telling us it would be impossible,”
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I’d heard that Banksy had become “increasingly paranoid,” and I wondered whether the accusations of hypocrisy had worn on him, and whether he was able to enjoy his success. “I have been called a sellout, but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want?” he wrote. “I think it was easier when I was the underdog, and I had a lot of practise at it. The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that’s an easy problem to solve—you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for me.” He went on, “I love the way capitalism finds a place—even for its enemies. It’s definitely boom time in the discontent industry. I mean, how many cakes does Michael Moore get through?”
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Banksy has always had a fatalistic streak: in one of his books, a pair of lovebirds is juxtaposed with the dictum “As soon as you meet someone, you know the reason you will leave them.”
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At the bottom of the e-mail, Banksy had appended a file. I opened it, and the screen filled with a black-and-white image. An artist—shown in profile, with proud posture and Vandyke whiskers—sits in the shade of a parasol. Next to him, propped on an easel, stands a canvas covered with graffiti. The artist’s fingers are gnarled, like a rat.
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he British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. For a while now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch, then in Hoxton. Joel Unangst, who had the nearly unprecedented experience of meeting Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much already, that they are covered with smudges of white paint.
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He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V.
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’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breez
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who had the nearly unprecedented experience of mee
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raffiti art.
by Lauren Collins
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he British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate
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. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout.
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aversion to nepotism
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ostracism
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conceptual necessity
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Anonymity
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picking at cubes of cheese.
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Evening Standard
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febrile speculation
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“quality vandal,”
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“Existencilism,”
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“Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall,” and “Cut It Out.” His latest, “Wall and Piece,” was published by Random House and has sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies.
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“I Don’t Believe In Anything. I’m Just Here for the Violence.”
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(Mona Lisa with a yellow smiley face, a pastoral landscape surrounded by crime-scene tape)
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“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.”
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It sold for two hundred thousand.
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five hundred and seventy-five thousand
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“He is the quickest-growing artist anyone has ever seen of all time.” Banksy responded to the Sotheby’s sale by posting a painting on his Web site. It featured an auctioneer presiding over a crowd of rapt bidders, with the caption “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.”
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. While setting up the show in Los Angeles, Banksy ordered a pizza, ate it, and tossed the box in a Dumpster. Within weeks, the pizza box was sold on eBay, for a hundred and two dollars. The seller suggested that a few anchovies that had been left inside might yield traces of Banksy’s DNA.
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‘This is absolute ****.’ ” He elaborated: “Hollywood is a town where they honor 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.”
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He asked me if I had any problems with him bringing in a live elephant, and I said, ‘No, it’s cool.’ ” Unangst was instructed to refer to Banksy by an alias, which he refused to divulge, except to say that it was “a regular male name.”
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Still, Keanu Reeves and Jude Law had shown up at a V.I.P. preview the evening before, as had Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who bought several pieces.
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The activists said that the paint was toxic.
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I asked Unangst what more he could tell me about Banksy, and he replied, “The only thing I can say is he’s like everybody, but he’s like nobody.”
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“Banksy is a genius and a madman,” Unangst continued.
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“He was the grimiest person I’d ever met,” she said. “He looked like someone from one of those British industrial towns from the nineteenth century. There was a layer of grit on him.”
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“Even if I just found one of his little rats, it’d be awesome,” Stapleton said.
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“It was insane,” he said. “People were fighting—‘I want this, I want that.’ ”
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Graffiti aficionados like to say that the form is as ancient as cave drawing, and Banksy takes a similarly romantic view. “Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked,” he once wrote. “Where the street was awash with a million colors and little phrases. . . . A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business.”
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“Let’s just say we have picked up a lot of clients with the way we do business,” he said.
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02 Feb 14
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Anonymity enables its adopter to seek fame while shielding him from the meaner consequences of fame-seeking. In exchange for ceding credit, he is freed from the obligations of authorship.
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Banksy is a household name in England—the Evening Standard has mentioned him thirty-eight times in the past six months—but his identity is a subject of febrile speculation.
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His anonymity is said to be born of a desire—understandable enough for a “quality vandal,” as he likes to be called—to elude the police.
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Confronted with a blank surface, he will cover it with scenes of anti-authoritarian whimsy: Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, two policemen kissing, a military helicopter crowned by a pink bow.
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“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.”
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“The art world is the biggest joke going,” he has said. “It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.”
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Banksy responded to the Sotheby’s sale by posting a painting on his Web site. It featured an auctioneer presiding over a crowd of rapt bidders, with the caption “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.”
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While setting up the show in Los Angeles, Banksy ordered a pizza, ate it, and tossed the box in a Dumpster. Within weeks, the pizza box was sold on eBay, for a hundred and two dollars. The seller suggested that a few anchovies that had been left inside might yield traces of Banksy’s DNA.
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“Like most people, I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together,”
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Banksy, typically, was flipping off the art world and begging it to notice him at the same time.
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Pleasing crowds, not cognoscenti, however, remains his stated aim.
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We set up a meeting in the middle of the night. Banksy rolls up in an S.U.V. and looks around. He asked me if I had any problems with him bringing in a live elephant, and I said, ‘No, it’s cool.’ ” Unangst was instructed to refer to Banksy by an alias, which he refused to divulge, except to say that it was “a regular male name.”
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“These days, everyone is trying to be famous, but he has anonymity,” Pitt told reporters. “I think that’s great.” The irony may have been lost on Pitt that one of Banksy’s publicists had invited him.
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Banksy was displaying an eight-thousand-pound elephant named Tai, whose hide he had painted red and embellished with gold fleurs-de-lis, to match the wallpaper of a parlor he had constructed.
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I asked Unangst what more he could tell me about Banksy, and he replied, “The only thing I can say is he’s like everybody, but he’s like nobody.”
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he had created five hundred doctored copies of Paris Hilton’s début CD and distributed them in record stores all over the U.K. Hilton appeared topless on the cover, and her song titles included “Why Am I Famous?” and “What Am I For?”
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ven on Banksy’s home turf, it’s hard to know what to look for, or where to look. For many of his admirers, that’s the fun of it: scouring a city for him, or his art works, invests a potentially monotonous activity with the possibility of discovery
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“The best I can do is to tell you,” he wrote in an e-mail, “that they don’t call him BANKsy for nothing.”
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The gallery’s motto is “Art by People,” but its affiliates exhibit a caginess toward anyone outside their circle of trusted accomplices, many of whom work in semi-symbiosis
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On a Friday morning, a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the gallery, an increasingly common problem for Lazarides. “The hookers get really upset if you block their doorway,” a neighbor told me, pointing upstairs. The gallery was supposed to open at noon, but the doors were locked.
Peregrine Hill and Dan Mitchell, partners in a London law firm, were among those on the sidewalk. Worried that the show would sell out before they got there, they had cut out of work. They were dressed in suits and ties and had come armed with a P.D.A. and a computer printout.
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The next to arrive was Caitlin Stapleton, on spring break from Northeastern University. “Me and my sister are here visiting, and I’m obsessed with Banksy,” she said. “I’m like, I’m going to go on an actual trip and find things by him.”
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Clean & Green is charged with cleaning up graffiti blight, which costs the city more than three hundred thousand dollars each year. “It annoys me, it frustrates me, because it’s just so ugly,” James sai
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Graffiti aficionados like to say that the form is as ancient as cave drawing, and Banksy takes a similarly romantic view. “Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked,” he once wrote. “Where the street was awash with a million colors and little phrases. . . . A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business.”
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For a minimum bid of four hundred thousand dollars, a buyer would receive the mural—with the house thrown in “for free.” The Anslows, who have an art gallery in Devon called the Red Propeller, announced the offer just after the February Sotheby’s auction.
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“The house is fucked. It’s completely shabby. That’s why they can’t sell it.” He launched into an impersonation of the putative landlord: “‘It’s this really lovely three-bedroom shithole in Easton, but it’s got a masterpiece painted on the side.’ ”
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“It wasn’t open to us, so we just decided to open up a different branch of art,” he said. “It’s a bit like being a d.j.—you’re in the club and they’re playing nothing you like. All of a sudden, you have to put on your own club night.” He went on, “To be honest, I have no idea how I got made the designated gallery owner, out of everybody.”
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“I feel in many ways that we are only at the beginning,” she said. Michael Fischer, a hedge-fund manager who collects Banksy, put it this way: “He’s gone from zero to a hundred in, like, three seconds.”
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“In theory, he’s anti-art establishment, and here I am in this Knightsbridge art gallery, but I would also like to think, deep down, that he would be proud to think of his work being surrounded by Picassos.”
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Whatever guile Lazarides possesses is offset, however, by a winning ingenuousness. He was not happy about the Banksy exhibition at Andipa. It was “piracy,” he said. He mentioned that Andipa had tried to reach him. “He called me Stavros, and I called him a cock,” he said, breaking into a grin. “Nothing I love more than failing aristocrats.”
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I’d heard that Banksy had become “increasingly paranoid,” and I wondered whether the accusations of hypocrisy had worn on him, and whether he was able to enjoy his success. “I have been called a sellout, but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want?” he wrote. “I think it was easier when I was the underdog, and I had a lot of practise at it. The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that’s an easy problem to solve—you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for me.” He went on, “I love the way capitalism finds a place—even for its enemies. It’s definitely boom time in the discontent industry. I mean, how many cakes does Michael Moore get through?”
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“Why do you do what you do?” I asked.
Banksy replied, “I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.”
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A few days after the show in Los Angeles opened I was painting under a freeway downtown when a homeless guy ran over and said, ‘Hey—are you Binsky?’ I left the next day.”
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Lauren Collins
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he British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. For a while now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch, then in Hoxton.
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Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers.
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overed with smudges of white paint.
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Anonymity enables its adopter to seek fame while shielding him from the meaner consequences of fame-seeking
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Banksy, for instance, does not attend his own openings
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the Evening Standard has mentioned him thirty-eight times in the past six months
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ebrile speculation
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“quality vandal,”
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or years now, he has refused to do face-to-face interviews.
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Banksy surfaces from time to time to prod the popular conscienc
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His aesthetic is clean and instantly readable—b
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Banksy has parlayed his knack for reducing ideas to simple visual elements into what a critic recently termed “red nose rebellion.”
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nksy sometimes satirizes even his own sanctimony. “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.”
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revels in the incongruities of his persona. “The art world is the biggest joke going,”
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“It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.”
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relationship
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with Sotheby’s
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. “Bombing Middle England”
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(“Bombing” is slang for writing graffiti.)
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“He is the quickest-growing artist anyone has ever seen of all time.”
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responded
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Sotheby’s sale by posting a painting on his Web site. It featured an auctioneer presiding ove
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“I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.”
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Such antagonism goads people, as it is designed to.
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Wikipedia entry for Banksy began,
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nancy boy
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rip-off.
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bloody sod
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glorifies what is essentially vandalism,”
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“I think there’s some wit in Banksy’s work, some cleverness—and a massive bucket of hot steaming hype.”
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for a hundred and two dollars.
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Like most people, I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together,”
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wrote in “Existencilism.”
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ch is different, but they all possess an impish poignancy that made them an immediate hit with London pedestrians.
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Banksy, typically, was flipping off the art world and begging it to notice him at the same time.
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“Hollywood is a town where they honor 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.”
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his confederates (a team of “fun-loving Englishmen,”
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Their m.o. is stealth
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a temporary gallery, and, almost before anyone knows they’ve been there, break it all down and get the hell out. Unangst
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recalled,
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Unangst was instructed to refer to Banksy by an alias,
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“I thought it was going to be a quaint little art show.”
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titled “Barely Legal.”
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ude La
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Keanu Reeve
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Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt,
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he irony may have been lost on Pitt that one of Banksy’s publicists had invited him.
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The elephant in the room, a handout proclaimed, was global poverty.)
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Other people were angry about a large portrait of Mother Teresa overlaid with the words “I learnt a valuable lesson from this woman. Moisturise everyday.”
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The only thing I can say is he’s like everybody, but he’s like nobody.”
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“Banksy is a genius and a madman,” Unangst continued.
“He’s a guy from Bristol,” someone who knows him told me later.
“I’m not obliged to say more than I’m obliged to,” another loyalist said.
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Cheyenne Westphal
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Along with graffitiing several local buildings, he bought a blowup doll and dressed it in a hood and an orange jumpsuit, as a Guantánamo prisoner. Then he sneaked into Disneyland and installed it along the path of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride, where it remained for ninety minutes
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“How’s My Bombing?”
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It connected to a Navy recruiting station in Arizona.
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it’s hard to know what to look for, or where to look
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e visited the reggae singer Buju Banton, at his studio
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ocumented the occasion.
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eve Lazarides confirmed to the Standard that Banksy had been in Jamaica, but said that Rickards had the wrong guy.
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Buju Banton,
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Rickards tried to ruin something that has a mystique, and that isn’t cool,
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“Banksy’s an artist that not everyone should have a piece of,”
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oused in a former sex shop on the ground floor of a four-story brick building in Soho, in London.
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gallery is
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Steve Lazarides’s
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He gained Banksy’s confidence and began serving as his fixer, gatekeeper, and, eventually, agent
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“Art by People,”
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Remi Kabaka,
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. At a recent party at a bar nearby, his name was the password for entry.
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On a Friday morning, a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the gallery, an increasingly common problem for Lazarides. “The hookers get really upset if you block their doorway,” a neighbor told me, pointing upstairs. The gallery was supposed to open at noon, but the doors were locked.
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“Me and my sister are here visiting, and I’m obsessed with Banksy,” she said. “I’m like, I’m going to go on an actual trip and find things by him.”
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It was insane,” he said. “People were fighting—‘I want this, I want that.’ ”
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ll these little lads look at Banksy the way the youngsters who are into football look at Beckham—he’s their hero,
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Bristol Clean & Green
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cleaning up graffiti blight,
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three hundred thousand dollars each year
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It annoys me, it frustrates me, because it’s just so ugly,”
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Graffiti aficionados like to say that the form is as ancient as cave drawing, and Banksy takes a similarly romantic view
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Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked,” he once wrote. “Where the street was awash with a million colors and little phrases. . . . A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business.”
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If Bristol is, as James told me, “the graffiti capital of England,”
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patron sinner
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ninety-three per cent said the mural should stay. So it did.
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If the council wants to do something it should cut down that dreadful shrub which is obscuring the piece.”
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“I can relate to that, because we’ve got a problem with shopping trolleys.”
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Municipal lawmakers are not the only Bristolians to have taken a faddish interest in Banksy:
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The Anslows, who have an art gallery in Devon called the Red Propeller, announced the offer just after the February Sotheby’s auction.
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Greedy Owners Try to Cash In on Banksy Mural.’ ” A
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was easier to see why Banksy makes himself scarce.
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Ben Bloodworth, and wondered if we knew that, a few days earlier, a city contractor had tried to destroy the mural.
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If you can get a group of more than twenty people to come down, then maybe that’ll be enough to stop me,’
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had shown up
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publicity ploy by the sellers.
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he mural was defaced with a bucket of red paint.)
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“Mr. Banks is away polishing one of his yachts.”
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Suddenly, it’s become all right amongst the proper art world to collect street art.”
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Mark Jenkins, who makes anthropomorphic figures from packing tape
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It’s a proper piece of street art!” he yelled.
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Lazarides talked to an assistant for a few minutes about preparations for the evening
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“I get all the crazy shit, basically,” Lazarides said.
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It was a private club, where we were to eat lunch.
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so we just decided to open up a different branch of art,”
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“To be honest, I have no idea how I got made the designated gallery owner, out of everybody.”
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Acoris Andipa
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gallerist named
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he Andipa family was first recognized in 1593 in Venice, although our history actually goes back much further, to the time of the Bible,” he told me when I visited.
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Sitting at his desk, dressed in a pin-striped suit
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nusual show for him.
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Cheyenne Westphal, from Sotheby’s
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He’s gone from zero to a hundred in, like, three seconds.”
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Andipa does not represent any artists, so all his shows are privately sourced.
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but the conversation “lasted a minute.”
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Let’s just say we have picked up a lot of clients with the way we do business,”
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Andipa had instituted a no-street-art policy
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“street art must remain on the street”
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They’re all very polite.”
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“In theory, he’s anti-art establishment, and here I am in this Knightsbridge art gallery, but I would also like to think, deep down, that he would be proud to think of his work being surrounded by Picassos.”
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nksy is so intimately tied to Lazarides’s success,
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more than one has speculated that Lazarides is Banksy.
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unlikely
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nksy is occupation enough for one man
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Lazarides is in deep.
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he admitted it wasn’t quite true.
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Lazarides is no rube: type “Banksy” into Google and ads for Laz Inc. come up.)
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He was not happy about the Banksy exhibition at Andipa.
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“He called me Stavros, and I called him a cock,”
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“Nothing I love more than failing aristocrats.”
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“Bloke on Neal Street doing a roaring trade in fake Banksys.”
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“What drew you to Mark’s work?”
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“It’s fuckin’ funny, man.”
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lying low” for at least a year. An edition of his “I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit” paint
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ne Friday at the end of April, when I checked my e-mail there was a message from Banksy
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“Hello there,” it went. “Thanks for taking an interest in my stuff.”
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uestions over e-mail.
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wryly eloquent
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“I don’t think art is much of a spectator sport these days,” he began. “I don’t know how the art world gets away with it, it’s not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the d.j. says, ‘If you read the thesis that comes with this, it would make more sense.’ ”
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eemed less playful
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“increasingly paranoid,”
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whether he was able to enjoy his success.
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paintings for free, how many more do you want?”
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The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable,
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asy problem to solve—you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for me.”
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capitalism finds a place—even for its enemies
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how many cakes does Michael Moore get through?”
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“Why do you do what you do?” I asked.
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“I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.”
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(“I think it’s pretty incredible a city council is prepared to make value judgments about preserving illegally painted graffiti. I’m kind of proud of them”).
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Banksy has always had a fatalistic streak
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“What happens if you are found out?” I wrote.
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“Maintaining anonymity can be kind of crippling. I gave a painting to my favorite pub to settle a tab once, which they hung above the bar. So many people came in asking questions about it I haven’t been back there for two years.
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In retrospect getting your work in the newspapers is a really dumb thing to do if what you do requires a certain level of anonymity.
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Hey—are you Binsky?’ I left the next day.
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ad appended a file.
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An artist—shown in profile, with proud posture and Vandyke whiskers—sits in the shade of a parasol. Next to him, propped on an easel, stands a canvas covered with graffiti. The artist’s fingers are gnarled, like a rat. ♦
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20 Oct 13
Lawrence Hrubes"“Why do you do what you do?” I asked.
Banksy replied, “I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.”" -
23 Sep 13
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Anonymity enables its adopter to seek fame while shielding him from the meaner consequences of fame-seeking.
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und 1993, his graffiti began appearing on trains and walls around Bristol; by 2001, his blocky spray-painted signature had cropped up all over the United Kingdom, eliciting both civic hand-wringing and comparisons to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Vienna, San Francisco, Barcelona, and Paris
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He self-published his first three volumes, “Existencilism,” “Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall,” and “Cut It Out.” His latest, “Wall and Piece,” was published by Random House and has sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copie
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Banksy sometimes satirizes even his own sanctimony. “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.” Still, he posts news clips on his Web site, alongside video footage of successful stunts.
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“We are concerned that Banksy’s street art glorifies what is essentially vandalism,
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01 Feb 13
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Banksy like
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14 Nov 11
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06 Apr 10
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21 Mar 08
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27 Nov 07
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05 Jul 07
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09 Jun 07
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19 May 07
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16 May 07
Jan Zuppingerthe new yorker has posted a lengthy piece on banksy
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15 May 07
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