Banksy is a well-known yet pseudo-anonymousEnglish graffiti artist, possibly named Robert Banks. It is believed that Banksy is a Yate native (near Bristol) who was born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and basic personal and biographical details. His artworks are often satirical pieces of art which encompass topics from politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti with a distinctive stencilling technique, has appeared in London and in cities around the world.
Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist in the late 1990s as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), often assisting writers Kato and Tes. In 1998 he arranged the enormous 'Walls On Fire' graffiti jam along with fellow Bristol graffiti legend Inkie on the site of the future 'Bristol' development. The weekend long event drew artists from all over the UK and Europe and his organisation of the event established his name within the European graffiti scene. By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a 'piece'. He claims he changed to stencilling whilst he was hiding from the police under a train carriage, and soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London.
Banksy's stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment or pro-freedom. Subjects include animals such as monkeys and rats, policemen, soldiers, children and the elderly. He also makes stickers (the Neighbourhood Watch subvert) and sculpture (the murdered phonebox), and was responsible for the cover art of Blur's 2003 album Think Tank.
In 2003 in a show called 'Turf War', held in a warehouse, he painted on animals. Although the RSPCA declared the conditions suitable, an animal rights activist chained herself to the railings in protest.
He has moved on to producing subverted paintings; one example is Monet's Water Lily Pond, adapted to include urban detritus such as litter and a shopping trolley floating in its reflective waters, another is Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, redrawn to show that the characters are looking at an English football hooligan dressed only in his Union Flag underpants, who has just thrown an object through the glass window of the cafe. These oil paintings were exhibited at a twelve day exhibition in Westbourne Grove, London in 2005.
In August 2004, Banksy produced a quantity of spoof British £10 notes substituting Princess Diana's head for the Queen's and changing 'Bank of England' to 'Banksy of England' Someone threw a large wad of these into a crowd at Notting Hill Carnival that year which some recipients then tried to spend in local shops. These notes were also given with invitations to a picturesonwalls.com Santas Ghetto exhibition. The individual notes have since been selling on eBay for about £200 each. A Limited run of 50 signed posters containing 10 uncut notes were also produced and sold by pictures on walls for £100 each to commemorate the passing of Princess Diana. One of these sold in May 2007 on eBay for $35,000. Banksy decorated a corridor in The Carlton Arms hotel in NYC.
In 2006, Banksy held an exhibition called Barely Legal, billed as a "three day vandalised warehouse extravaganza" in Los Angeles on the weekend of 16 September. The exhibition featured a live 'elephant in a room', painted in a pink and gold floral wallpaper pattern.[9]
After Christina Aguilera bought an original of Queen Victoria as a lesbian and two prints for £25,000,[10] on 19 October 2006 a set of Kate Moss paintings sold in Sotheby's London for £50,400, setting an auction record for Banksy's work. The six silk-screen prints, featuring the model painted in the style of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe pictures, sold for five times its estimated value. His stencil of a green Mona Lisa with paint dripping from her eyes sold for £57,600 at the same auction.
On 7 February 2007, Sotheby's auction house in London auctioned three Banksy works and reached the highest ever price for a Banksy work at auction of over £102,000 for his Bombing Middle England. Two of his other graffiti works, Balloon Girl and Bomb Hugger, sold for £37,200 and £31,200 respectively, which were well above their estimate prices.The following day's auction saw a further three Banksy works reach soaring prices. Ballerina With Action Man Parts reached £96,000 whilst Glory sold for £72,000 and Untitled (2004) sold for £33,600 - all three auctions sold way over expected estimates.To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website front home page with a new image of an auction house scene with people bidding on a picture that said, "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit."
In February 2007, the owners of a house with a Banksy mural on the side in Bristol decided to sell the house through an art gallery after offers fell through because the prospective buyers wanted to remove the mural. It is listed as a mural which comes with a house attached.
A small number of his works can be seen in the movie Children of Men including a stenciled image of two policemen kissing, and another stencil of a child looking down a shop.
In April 2007, Transport for London painted over Banksy's iconic image of a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns. Although the image was very popular, Transport for London claimed that the "graffiti" created a general atmosphere of neglect and social decay which in turn encourages crime.
On April 27th 2007, a new record high for the sale of Banksy's work was set with the auction of the work 'Space Girl & Bird' fetching £288,000 ($576,000), around 20 times the estimate at Bonhams of London.
Banksy has published a "manifesto" on his website. The text of the manifesto is credited as the diary entry of one Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO, which is exhibited in the Imperial War Museum. It describes how a shipment of lipstick to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation at the end of World War II helped the internees regain their humanity.
21st May 2007 Banksy gained the award for Art's Greatest living Briton, Banksy as expected did not turn up to collect his award and continued with his notorious anonymous status.
