How Banksy Changed The Art World
Making a film about graffiti, politics & the commodification of street art.
I’ve been revisiting some old projects recently, some of which stalled at the idea stage, some of which hit the buffers while in development, some of which gathered momentum, collected finance, and broke through into becoming something.
Banksy & The Rise of Outlaw Art belongs to the latter category. Released during the Covid pandemic, the film has since screened at cinemas, on television and on streaming platforms across the world.
As Writer, Producer, Director & Editor of the film I’ve had numberless requests for interviews and media appearances. The requests keep coming, I often get an email with a question about the film or asking for my thoughts on the latest Banksy piece. It seems that the interest is unabating so, for those who retain that interest, I thought I’d share some of the interviews that I’ve given over the last couple of years, my thoughts on Banksy, politics & the economics of art.
The question/answer that I’ve placed first in this article gives an overview of some of the themes that come out in these interviews, we then move through the natural order of questions about the origins of the film, Banksy’s career, and then the more expansive themes about the art business.
The following was originally published in Vanity Fair, Vogue Magazine, La Reppublica, Arte, Forbes and other publications in Russia, Italy & Japan.
In what way do you think Banksy has changed the way that art is being exhibited and sold today?
First of all he was a key figure in the evolution of street art, from its origins in graffiti. Though it has a rich and interesting legacy, graffiti is ultimately a relatively limited artform, and I would imagine that there is a huge number of artists that wouldn’t necessarily have had an interest in graffiti art. By widening the space which graffiti occupied, that is to say, illegal art in public places, I think Banksy helped to inspire artists to create work intended to be exhibited for free in urban environments and other shared public spaces, something that they may never have done when unauthorised urban art was pretty much just graffiti.
After that, he completely broke the system of galleries and patronage which regulated how art is exhibited and sold, he showed that artists could do it themselves, that they didn’t need to conform to the existing, and quite often elitist, structures of the art world.
Why did you initially set out to make “Banksy and the rise of outlaw art”?
The idea first occurred to me shortly after the Shredding of Girl With Balloon at Sotheby’s in 2018 — the event that is now known as a work of art in its own right, and referred to as Love Is In The Bin.
I was in France at the time and there was a huge amount of conversation about it, people were astonished, delighted, provoked; and it reminded me of the reactions that people had had towards Banksy ten, fifteen years earlier, when he was doing the museum invasions and the other pranks and stunts — I remembered how those events had made people laugh, and, even though it had all been illegal, people cheered him on, it felt at the time like he was striking a blow for the common man. The Sotheby’s event also seemed like that, and produced a similar reaction, and it occurred to me that it had been a pretty long time since he, or anyone else, had done something like that.
In the few years prior to Sotheby’s Banksy had been much more concerned with his large installations, like Dismaland and The Walled Off Hotel, than the stunts that he had gone in for in his early years, and it reminded me just how long Banksy’s career has been, and how no-one has really emerged in contemporary art since, and achieved anything like the same degree of cultural importance.
At the same time, I reflected that, partly because of the anonymity, because he just pops up from time-to-time with a new street piece or surprise exhibition, people tend to just engage with his work spontaneously at the time, and that there’s really been nothing that has properly traced and contextualized the Banksy story. It’s an incredible story in its own right, but, as one of the first, and certainly the most recognized, figures in the contemporary street art movement, Banksy’s story is also the story of street art, which itself emerged from graffiti — this was an art movement that society wanted to crush, that cities directed all the resources of law enforcement at persecuting, and yet it became really the most important art movement of the twenty-first century. I decided that I wanted to tell that story.
First, basic question: why Banksy? So far your work has been focused on musicians…
Well my work is really histories, as a broad theme (I’ve made shows on war, crime and so on), but with a particular focus on art generally and music specifically. If you’re familiar with my previous work you’ll know that it’s really cultural history, with music set into historical, social and cultural context. Dawn Of The Dead, for example, is ostensibly about the Grateful Dead, but it’s actually about the American counter-culture and San Francisco hippie scene from the early 60s to the early 70s. So although Banksy is not a musician, he’s still an artist and a cultural figure, one who has had an enormous impact on the shape of culture in the early 21st century, just as Bob Dylan had an enormous impact on the shape of culture in the mid-to-late twentieth century. In that respect, I see this project as very much of a piece with my previous work. And music is a big part of this film as well.
Banksy emerged when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and he’s only a few years older than I am, so we have a shared cultural frame of reference — the Poll Tax riots that radicalized him were also a huge event in my life, and impacted on my own politics; same with the Criminal Justice Act, which was a law aimed at persecuting British youth culture at the time that both he and I were youths. I opened my first production offices on Rivington street in Shoreditch at the same time that he held his first, illegal, “street exhibition” in the tunnel on Rivington St. I remember the rats going up everywhere, I used to drink, on occasion, in the Dragon Bar where he and Ben Eine and Shepard Fairey and all the other street artists would drink. Unlike most of my previous films, this was an opportunity to tell a story from a period that I’d also lived through as a contemporary, which was very attractive.
We see in your doc that the environment he grew up in — Bristol, the music, the fellow artists there — is very important. Could you explain why? And considering that we all are the products of our background somehow, what’s specific about him?
Bristol is a small city, in terms of its contribution to British art, it punches massively above its weight. That wasn’t always the case, in the 70s not an awful lot came out of Bristol, but the sound systems that started in the 80s, a product of the rich and diverse ethnic mix in the city, really put it on the map. From The Wild Bunch Sound System came Massive Attack, Tricky and Nellee Hooper (who produced Soul II Soul and Bjork), and the city created a whole new sub-genre of music in the form of “Trip Hop”, which had a huge impact on music globally. Alongside that, Robert Del Naja of The Wild Bunch and later Massive Attack had travelled to New York in the early 80s and brought graffiti back to Bristol — he was arguably the first UK graffiti artist- and so Bristol became one of the first hubs for graffiti. So Bristol had it’s own very distinctive art and music scene, and that produced a local culture with a particular outlook — independent, anti-authoritarian, left-wing, and you can see that tradition running through Banksy’s work.
What role did British politics and Margaret Thatcher personally play in suppressing the graffiti movement?
The Thatcher, and more directly the Major government, generally sought to suppress any non-conformist sub-cultures or radical movements in Britain during the 80s and 90s. Thatcher’s project was to remake the country and embed conservatism and conservative attitudes within society and culture. Initially this took the form of attacks on the structures of the left — the trade unions, local councils (which tended, particularly in the cities, to be led by the left), social housing organisations and so on — but it also extended to non-conformists and non-conformist groups, so the traveler community, for example, came under enormous pressure. It was all framed as a law and order issue, so certain behaviours were criminalized, most notoriously unlicensed music events, with the “Criminal Justice Act” introduced by the Major government. Graffiti, as an illegal activity, was obviously taken very seriously by governments of this nature and they sought to implement measures against it.
What do you think you understood about him that most people don’t get?
Interesting question. The origins of his politics and some of the cultural references in his work, I would say. They’re very specific to a certain part of British cultural heritage from the late 80s and early 90s, unless you’re British and in touch with that period it’s very difficult to understand — it’s a kind of a package of outsider/raver/traveller/environmentalist/anarchist postures that was found in the dance music scene in the early 90s, in particular in the South West (which is where Bristol is). The Glastonbury Festival at the time was very representative of that strain in British youth culture, a strain that you can see in his work.
I also think people don’t really understand that he’s a graffiti artist. He isn’t, and hasn’t been for years, but his origins are absolutely in traditional graffiti and the graffiti scene. He has carried the ethos of graffiti into his work as a stencil artist and the particular way in which he has contributed to the street art movement. So although he hasn’t painted graffiti in years, he is still, in some respects, a graffiti artist, I would say; although graffiti artists and aficionados will now be implacably outraged by me.
What has been the most interesting explanation of Banksy’s work you’ve ever heard?
The most interesting interpretation of Banksy’s work that I have heard came from Steve Lazarides, Banksy’s former close collaborator. Steve is a fascinating contributor to the film, his relationship with Banksy started in the late 90s when they first met in Bristol and he was with Banksy as his photographer/driver/agent/manager all the way through the critical early period. Steve remarked to me that Banksy’s work “didn’t make people feel stupid” and I think that that is a really important insight. Contemporary art has always been pretty exclusive — it’s designated as “high culture”, framed in galleries and museums in expensive parts of town where most people feel out of place and inadequate, and talked about interpretively, with it’s own lexicon that the average person knows nothing about. And that’s the point, people often feel criticized by contemporary art — it makes them feel that they’re not cultured, sophisticated, intelligent enough. And that’s what Banksy demolished: by producing simple, clear images that anybody could understand (that you didn’t have to recognise as a post-modern reference to Duchamp or something) and placing those images where people lived, the average person stopped feeling as if they were stupid and started to feel that, as Steve puts it, “for the first time, I can like art”.
We may not know his real name, but his art is unmistakably the work of a passionate individual. Does it matter who Banksy is? Is it appropriate to unmask a man who chooses to live in anonymity?
I don’t think that it’s appropriate to unmask a man who chooses to live in anonymity, absolutely not. How he chooses to live his life is his business and not the public’s, especially as he has not made himself a public figure.
I think that Banksy is best understood through his work and through the historical context of his work — some of the details and events in his life, yes, but not his name or the names of his family. I also think that people don’t really want to know, it’s better not to know. The story of an anonymous artist is lost completely once the anonymity is lifted.
Your film explores all the history of Banksy’s work. Why is Banksy controversial?
“Controversial” is an interesting word, I’m not sure that Banksy is particularly controversial. If there was any controversy then I think that it was attached to his early career just because of the illegality — should you drill into the wall of The Natural History Museum, for example, is that ok?
But I think that since then Banksy’s work can sometimes highlight controversial issues, but without the work itself being particularly controversial — which is why he has almost always managed to be more of a unifying, rather than divisive figure. If you consider the mural of the EU flag with the single dropped star in Dover: Brexit is a hugely contentious, controversial issue, but I don’t think that work was, it was elevated beyond the level of rancor, I think both sides could see it as a simple statement of truth. Similarly his painting of the apes in parliament — when it was used to mark the Brexit debates it spoke for the vast majority, I would suggest.
So I think he comments on controversies — concepts of rights, commodification in art and in society generally — but in way that is usually uncontroversial. Consider the stencil that he placed in Birmingham at Xmas, to highlight the plight of the homeless: homelessness has increased by over 150% since the disastrous return of the Conservative Party to government in 2010 — this is uncontroversial, this is a fact. It needs highlighting though, and that’s what Banksy does so brilliantly.
I suppose that the exception would be his work in Palestine, in particular the Walled Off Hotel, which some on the pro-Israeli policy side have taken against — that has proved to be fairly controversial.
Banksy is one of the most popular and controversial figures of our time: he wants to subvert the art system but he brings street art into the mainstream, he is against the art market but does everything to raise his prices and popularity among collectors. What kind of person is Banksy beyond his media figure?
I think it’s easy to ascribe too much design to some of this. The things that you mention — bringing street art into the mainstream, escalating his prices etc. those are consequences of his activity, but they are not necessarily intended consequences. He’s a very driven, very ambitious character no doubt, and as an artist he wants people to see his work, of course he does, and he’s been very good at promoting it, but attracting “mainstream” interest, money, collectors etc is to some degree out of his hands. Ultimately, as an artist you put your work out there and the public will respond to it — you may remain obscure and niche or you may attract millions of followers, there’s so much that your level of recognition turns on, it’s not something that you can really plan for. Part of the reason, I would argue, that he became one of the most popular street artists is that his work has always been very, very accessible and has had a conceptual dimension, it’s not just aesthetics. And as Steve Lazarides says in the film “being populist doesn’t mean crass and shit, it just means that people like it”. The value of his work is also out of his hands, going back to the top of this conversation, Girl With Balloon sold at Sotheby’s for £1m, but it must be remembered that to Banksy it was worth £150 — because that is what he sold the print for.
Did he consciously work on his own fame? How?
I think that he’s been very good at cultivating his persona and building a following. I think there are two things that really separate Banksy from other graffiti and street artists, and explain why he became so successful: 1. The conceptual dimension to his work, which is stronger than most of his contemporaries who are, in the main, more concerned with aesthetics. 2. The way in which he promoted his art, he knew how to take street art into the galleries in a way which was cool and generated buzz — Steve Lazarides had a lot to do with that, I think. And the stunts — the museum invasions, the Guantanamo prisoner in Disneyland — those created enormous levels of publicity that in turn highlighted his visual art. He is an absolute master manipulator of the publicity machine, while simultaneously being able to present himself as an anonymous figure who shuns publicity. It is quite brilliant.
From Brad Pitt to Jude Law, Hollywood and the star system is crazy about Bansky. May you share with us some stories about this?
That started very early on, and I think it’s because Banksy appeared to be the first genuinely new, exciting artist that had appeared in years. People forget just how exciting he seemed at the start, particularly with the illegality, the anonymity. That created a lot of cultural heat around him and, of course, stars want to be associated with that. His close collaborator in those days, Ben Eine, mentions in the film that Banksy was very good at ingratiating himself with those kind of people, who some others may find a bit intimidating, he became friends with Jude Law in the early Shoreditch days, and Jude Law would show up to the shows, buy art. “Jude Law and also drug dealers” as Ben described their original clientele. That kind of celebrity endorsement was good for everyone; not just Banksy, but street artists in general. It brought a lot of attention to the whole scene, helped to publicise and market the art.
Steve Lazarides was also key in developing that kind of publicity, marketing what they were doing in a way that celebrities would want to be associated with. He tells the story of Banky’s first significant Los Angeles Exhibition, Barely Legal, back in 2006. The event was held in an empty warehouse in Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, Jude Law was there, Steve found himself talking to Christina Aguilera, he walked outside to get some air and was temporarily blinded by all the flash bulbs going off, as his vision cleared he saw Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie heading straight for him — in a back alley in the middle of Skid Row. It’s the type of thing that wouldn’t ordinarily happen.
What’s your opinion about all the exhibitions about his art? Isn’t it a contradiction to force outlaw/outdoor art inside a museum or a gallery?
Yes in the sense that the placement and the context of the work is critical to understanding it, and it changes when you remove it from that context and place it in a gallery. But it doesn’t ruin it entirely, a visual communication doesn’t become incomprehensible just because it’s on a gallery wall rather than on the side of a building — if that were the case then Banksy’s Wall & Piece book would be pointless, wouldn’t it? I think it depends on how the exhibition is curated — the work changes, but its essence and meaning remains largely intact, I think.
Obviously Banksy’s own exhibitions and installations recognise this by always trying to do something different, he doesn’t just hang his street pieces in galleries, he imagines an organised art exhibition as something completely distinct from street art.
I know he doesn’t like all the exhibitions that you mention, but I think that galleries and the people work in them generally put those on out of love and respect for the art and, look, it’s not possible to tour all of Banksy’s street pieces. Most people can’t cruise over to the West Bank and Gaza to have a look, most of the work is gone anyway, prints are unavailable or unattainable through expense — what’s wrong with gathering some of his works in one place for a short exhibition so that people can see and appreciate them?
What I do feel is deeply wrong is putting pieces taken from the street into galleries, it’s immoral and it encourages people to remove work from the street and trade in it. I also don’t agree with the merchandising some of these gallery exhibitions go in for — that’s out of order.
How did Banksy change the world of art?
He showed that you could become a success outside of the traditional art structures — the matrix of art schools, galleries, museums, financiers and patrons. He proved that it was possible to exist on your own terms outside of that very narrow, elitist context. He showed that art belongs to everyone, he made the average person on the street, who had always felt excluded from the art world, feel that they could enjoy art. He was revolutionary.
Do you really think that Banksy is outside the art system the way he wants people to believe? Is it true that Banksy does not earn anything from auction sales or non-authorized museum exhibitions?
As far as I’m aware he generally doesn’t make money from auctions of his work owned by others or from unauthorised exhibitions, no. As Steve Lazarides once said to me: “it doesn’t matter that Girl With Balloon sold for $1.3m, to Banksy it was worth £150”. Having said that, there are exceptions that I know of, where he has made money from some of his pieces going on sale. But the point is that he is outside the traditional art system and its economy, that is certainly true. He has created a thriving art system that is very lucrative for him but, as you will learn from the film, that’s in many ways his system — he had to create it. So no he’s not completely excluded from the economy (and profits) of commercialised art, but he isn’t part of the mainstream, established art economy, he has his own thing.
Who is the owner of a piece of street art? The community, the owner of the building or the artist? Can an artist like Banksy claim the copyright?
I would like to think the community. And no, I don’t think the artist can claim the copyright, either legally or morally. Street art involves dismissing and violating property rights, you can’t do that and then subsequently assert property rights. Where I do think that the artist has rights, however, is how the work is used transformatively. So if someone copies Girl With Balloon and then commodifies it with no transformative quality whatsoever e.g putting it on t-shirts and selling it, then I think that the artist has a right to object.
Do you think the world is ready for Bansky’s revolutionary message?
Yes, I mean I don’t think that it’s a particularly new message. It’s kind of a classic anti-authoritarian message, with a communitarian, social justice dimension. I suppose a bit anarcho-syndicalist-y, a kind of melange of the ideas that generally emanate from the libertarian left. So I don’t think that the messages that are found in his work are particularly unfamiliar.
What I do find interesting is that this sentiment has actually gained traction in recent years, with populations in the US and European democracies becoming incredibly sceptical of traditional authority. Previously, people had protested, say, the George W. Bush Presidency or The War On Terror, but these protests didn’t generally express themselves through the democratic institutions. One million people marched in London against the Iraq War, many of them holding placards designed by Banksy, but the government was still returned with a large majority at the subsequent election.
That’s all changed now, hasn’t it? Donald Trump, Brexit etc — these are all expressions of a consequential protest against the political classes, the traditional sectors of authority. The interesting thing, of course, is that these forms of protest elevate radical authoritarians (Trump), it’s a kind of mad, anti-authoritarian authoritarianism. So to see how some of those revolutionary messages have actually formed themselves into political movements, and the consequences, is pretty horrifying.
What’s the most powerful Banksy piece in your opinion and why?
For me it’s The Walled Off Hotel. I have always found his work in Palestine to be the most powerful art that he has created, starting with the paintings on the separation barrier in 2005. At the time that was such an incredible statement, to enter a military zone, approach that grey, forbidding apartheid wall and vandalise it with art that was both simple, but also deeply moral, justifiably brought him a different level of regard, worldwide.
The Walled Off Hotel is the pinnacle of his work in Palestine. It’s an installation that traces the whole history of the conflict, from the Balfour Declaration onwards, and sets the present situation in context. Importantly, as a British artist coming into that territory as an outsider, it acknowledges Britain’s responsibility for what has happened. It has often been remarked upon that where Banksy’s work is placed is as important as the work itself, the hotel is an installation about the conflict placed directly next to the separation barrier, one of the defining symbols of the dispute. It’s outstanding.
Which of his artworks would you show to children and teenagers in an art class, in order to let them learn the importance of freedom?
Wow that’s an interesting one. I think the Guantanamo inmate at Disneyland. Which not only reminds us of the importance of freedom, it also has something to say about how the freedom that we enjoy in the western democracies is sometimes constructed, which is disturbing to contemplate. A complex lesson for teenagers to consider, I think.
I was very disappointed of knowing that his Coronavirus-inspired artwork on to London tube has been removed. Are you? And why, in your opinion?
Ah look, that’s to be expected. The civil authorities will always blanketly remove all forms of graffiti reflexively, and in this case the cleaners were unaware that it was by Banksy. In recent years some local councils have sought to preserve pieces by Banksy, even though to do so conflicts with their own policy, but that had been a source of some controversy — who is to say which art is preserved and which is erased? And on what basis — simply because Banksy is famous and valued within the art market? Generally speaking though, tube crews will erase everything as a matter of course and it was no different in this case. I actually think Banksy is probably pleased about that, I think he values the temporary nature of street art as intrinsic to what it is and, after all, it is preserved in the photos and videos. But the art itself is a moment.
Banksy’s murals in Ukraine. A way to make people reflect on the war or a way to gain even more visibility for himself (this is how many Ukrainians themselves perceived it)?
No I don’t think Banksy’s work in Ukraine — which I thought was powerful — is some sort of cynical exercise in self-promotion. This is a long standing theme that runs throughout Banky’s career, beginning with his placards for the anti-Iraq War demo in London and moving through his work on the West Bank separation barrier and Gaza. He shows up to conflict zones with an anti-war, anti-imperialist message and tries to draw attention to the conflict, and how he thinks the conflict should be viewed. It seemed natural to me that the imperial war in Ukraine would present a canvas on which to restate this message. I loved the Putin Judo Throw image and I was pleased that Ukraine printed it on stamps, it’s a shame that people would impute selfish commercial motives.
Why do you think that in order to understand the artist’s work it is important to know his story? Isn’t art enough?
In most cases it is enough, yes. But your question has an underlying assumption that I don’t think is correct, which is that you would tell an artist’s story simply as a vehicle to better understand his or her work, that may not be the case at all, you might want to tell the story of an artist just because it’s a good story. In the case of Banksy it’s a good story and he happens to be an artist in which you do benefit from knowledge of that story in understanding his work. Banksy’s work is often highly referential, it can be self-referential, it often makes cultural references, political references. If you don’t understand those references and their context, your understanding of his work will be more limited.
What will the audience think about Banksy at the end of the film? Is he an artist or a vandal?
Most definitely an artist. There have been hundreds and thousands of vandals over the past twenty years, every teenaged tagger is a vandal, everyone that puts a brick through the window of McDonalds during a street protest is a vandal, but Banksy has the singular distinction of being one of the most important and influential artists of the twenty-first century to date. Basic acts of vandalism don’t converse with the cultural and political currents running through societies in the same way that Banksy’s street work does — just look at the work in Palestine, for example. Think about stencil of the cat on the wall of a destroyed, bombed out building and contemplate with me who is the artist and who is the vandal? The state that criminalises works of unauthorised public art, yet justifies carpet bombing civilian neighbourhoods? Or the criminal who is able to offer its beleaguered, traumatised victims a little bit of beauty, solidarity and empathy in their suffering and which is given freely to everyone?
In your opinion what will be the future of Banksy as an artist?
I think that Banksy’s future now belongs to history, that might sound obtuse or paradoxical, but what I mean is that I don’t expect him to do anything truly revolutionary in the future. That is not a criticism or disappointment, I think that it’s true for pretty much every artist. He’s now reached the point at which he’s had such a long career that his contribution to art history has been made and his significance has been recognised, indexed and absorbed into the work of subsequent artists, art movements and culture more broadly. He now has a legacy. He continues to do what he does, which is fine, but it won’t make the same impact that it did 20 years ago, it can’t. It’s just the nature of things.
Will his art survive him? How?
One of the reasons that Banksy became so prominent is that he coincided with the emergence of the internet. Graffiti and Street Art are temporary forms and, prior to the web, pieces were mainly seen by people passing in them in the street, before the work was removed by the authorities or covered over by other pieces. The internet enabled this temporary form to be preserved and shared worldwide, which meant that Banksy attracted a level of attention that he may not have done in a previous era. This is it now, this is the world, everything survives, for good or ill.
Banksy & The Rise of Outlaw Art can be seen on Amazon, Tubi, Apple and, lately I believe, YouTube.