Is this the proof Banksy’s shredded painting was just a cynical masterpiece of self-promotion?
He claims it was a protest against commercialism. But as his ‘destroyed’ work’s value soars . . .
EvERYONE agreed, if the Sotheby’s auctioneer knew of the drama about to unfold, he certainly gave no indication of it. ‘Lot 67, Banksy’s Girl With Balloon,’ he announced with his usual understated authority.
It was the final lot of the evening — ‘ the graveyard slot’, some call it — often reserved for a minor work when potential bidders have already begun to disperse.
Not this time. The New Bond Street saleroom remained packed. This was a Banksy, after all. The Spray-can Pimpernel, as he has been dubbed, hides behind a cloak of anonymity to mock the Establishment and satirise modern society — and has become one of Britain’s most successful artists.
Girl With Balloon had a more poignant, ambiguous message, the 100-strong gathering was informed in the catalogue notes, ‘leaving the viewer to decipher whether the girl is reaching for the balloon — a vibrant emblem of childhood delight — or rather has let it slip from her fingers, a metaphor perhaps for the inevitable loss of childhood and innocence’. It is possibly Banksy’s most widely known image, voted the nation’s favourite artwork last year ahead of Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire and Constable’s The Hay Wain.
The bidding was furious. £ 200,000 . . . £300,000. . . Sitting in the third row, Jonathan Cheung, head of acquisitions for London’s Maddox Gallery, came in at £650,000. ‘I couldn’t go beyond that,’ he said. He was gazumped. The canvas eventually sold to a telephone bidder for £860,000, which, with fees, brought the final total to £1.04 million.
But moments after the hammer came down, pandemonium. An alarm sounded and Girl With Balloon began to self-destruct. There were gasps as the artwork started to shred itself. Some guests almost dropped their champagne glasses, and one well-groomed, bespectacled man could be seen putting his hand to his forehead in disbelief. They had just witnessed the most spectacular prank in art history.
The escapade at Sotheby’s New Bond Street galleries on Friday last week came at the climax of the busiest week in the London art market, when international collectors fly in for the Frieze art fair. It made headlines around the world.
Banksy later posted a video on Instagram claiming ‘ responsibility’, showing Girl With Balloon being sliced into strips by blades he had secretly installed in the picture’s frame ‘a few years ago’, defending the stunt with a quote from Picasso: ‘The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.’
Behind the quotation lay Banksy’s contempt for what he and others see as the rampant commercialism and misplaced values of the art world. Booby-trapping his own creation seconds after it sold for more than £1 million was the ultimate expression of that credo.
Yet the added notoriety, some experts argue, could double the value of the vandalised Girl With Balloon and increase the value of all Banksy works, with opportunistic dealers reaping the commercial rewards. Will Banksy — who is widely acknowledged to be former public schoolboy Robin Gunningham, 45 — benefit financially?
He says he gives much of the money he makes to charity. But the author of his unauthorised biography, The Man Behind The Wall, noted that he was ‘much richer than I imagined’.
So might there be an element of hypocrisy in his latest stunt?
The buyer, Sotheby’s has revealed, is a female European collector and long- standing Sotheby’s client, who has decided to go through with the purchase for the same price achieved at auction.
The news was released in a statement from Sotheby’s on Thursday night, after a slick PR operation.
‘Banksy didn’t destroy an artwork in the auction, he created one,’ declared Alex Branczik, the auction house’s head of contemporary art in Europe. ‘ Following his surprise intervention on the night, we are pleased to confirm the sale of the artist’s newly titled Love Is In The Bin, the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction.’ THE
collaboration between the world’s most admired ‘guerrilla’ artist and an institution that caters, in Banksy’s own words, to ‘ the ‘ overprivileged, the pretentious and the weak’ will be seen by some as a betrayal of his anti-Establishment credentials. But how far did it go?
Sotheby’s insists it had ‘ no prior knowledge’ of the stunt and was ‘not in any way involved’.
There were rumours that — rather like Alfred Hitchcock, who made fleeting appearances in his own films — Banksy was in the saleroom on the night in question.
The grand finale was certainly worthy of a Hitchcock plot and, a week on, continues to fascinate.
Suspicious observers have pointed out that the frame of Girl With Balloon was so heavy it had to be hung on a load-bearing strip.
Sotheby’s say they asked Banksy’s studio — which provided a certificate of authenticity — if the frame could be removed during cataloguing but ‘we were expressly told not to’ because this could ‘damage the work and negatively impact its artistic value’.
‘This is not unusual,’ Sotheby’s pointed out. But wouldn’t the frame have been X- rayed by them nonetheless?
Sotheby’s says it doesn’t discuss security matters. But Paul Manning, a former Metropolitan Police officer who used to work in Mayfair and socialised with Sotheby’s security staff, says: ‘ Back in the Nineties, I was present when the X-rays from a Picasso were delivered. They did the frame as well as the painting.’
Sotheby’s own Mr Branczik has himself — inadvertently, perhaps — contributed to the speculation. The morning after the stunt, the words F*** EM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE, in black stencilled letters, appeared on his Instagram page, with the caption ‘Banksy-ed’. It prompted a flurry of responses. ‘I bet you knew,’ read the comment underneath Mr Branczik’s post. Others echoed that view.
Sotheby’s explained that the sentence with the expletive was a [word] painting by a U.S. artist, Christopher Wool, that is coming up for sale at Sotheby’s in New York.
‘He (Alex) felt it captured the spirit of the prank,’ the company said.
Clearly, not everyone who follows Mr Branczik on Instagram understood what he meant.
Our own inquiries suggest Banksy was not acting alone, despite his claim that he was.
The clue is in the date: 2006, which was when Girl With Balloon, a stencil spray painting, was given to the now previous owner by Banksy, and a shredder was built into the frame in case the owner might one day sell it.
This print is one of 25. ‘That’s a lot of booby-trapped frames to make just to punish secondary market sellers,’ the Art Market Monitor newsletter wryly concludes.
Moreover, the contraption surely needed batteries to have been activated, probably by remote control from inside the saleroom. But batteries are unlikely to last for 12 years — so it stands to reason that the person who acquired Girl With Balloon from Banksy must have co-operated with him.
That was confirmed to us by a dealer this week. ‘I met Banksy many
times before the auction,’ he said. ‘The seller knew about it. There have been many trials [Sotheby’s were not involved] in the last year for the shredder to be activated with the remote.’
The intrigue has also turned the spotlight on the man himself.
Banksy was unmasked as Robin Gunningham, from Bristol, in 2008 by The Mail on Sunday after a yearlong investigation. His parents, in their 70s, separated some years ago; his father, a retired contracts manager, lives in a housing association flat in the city; his mother, a former company director’s secretary, lives in a bungalow above Avon Gorge. They have never spoken about their son, a former pupil at Bristol Cathedral School.
After leaving the school at 16, the future Banksy drifted into Bristol’s thriving graffiti subculture. It is said that when, on one occasion, he found himself hiding from police under a dustcart, he noticed it had a serial number stencilled on it — a technique he subsequently employed to speed up producing his handiwork and so evade arrest. He never looked back.
Everyone has seen his work on a wall, poster or print. The Paparazzi Rat. Umbrella Girl. The Kissing Coppers. He left an inflatable doll dressed as a Guantanamo prisoner in Disneyland, California, hung a joke version of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and installed a ‘cave painting’ of a Stone Age hunter pushing a supermarket trolley at the British Museum.
His many celebrity collectors include Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera.
Few people are aware, though, that Banksy has settled down to married life. Mrs Banksy is Joy Millward, 39, who was brought up in Stourbridge in the West Midlands. The couple tied the knot at a Las Vegas chapel in 2006.
Miss Millward, the daughter of a businessman, was a researcher at the time for Austin Mitchell, the then Labour MP, before leaving Westminster to set up a lobby group that supports charities.
Miss Millward and Banksy used to share a two-bedroom flat on the eighth floor of a block in Shoreditch, East London. It was purchased in 2007 in Miss Millward’s name and she still owns it. It is not far from Old Street, where a Banksy mural of Pulp Fiction hitmen Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta holding bananas once graced the side of the Tube station. Mr and Mrs Banksy now reside in Kent.
How much is Banksy worth? It is impossible to say because officially he does not exist and his real name doesn’t appear to be on publicly accessible financial records.
But he is believed to be behind companies sitting on more than £4 million generated through his artwork. The most well-known is Pest Control, the sole agent for selling his artwork and authenticating it — or not, as the case may be; hence the name. It was Pest Control that authenticated the shredded Girl With Balloon.
The company’s registered office is above an empty shop in Hackney, East London. But Pest Control has assets of £2.2 million.
Some of the cash is used to fund Banksy’s projects, such as Dismaland, the ‘family theme park unsuitable for children’ in Weston-superMare, Somerset, that opened for 36 days a few years ago.
Then there is the hotel on the edge of Bethlehem ‘offering the worst view of any hotel in the world’ because of its location along the 400-mile concrete wall that cuts through the West Bank.
Opened last year, The Walled Off Hotel is full of Banksy’s artwork. Guests can sleep under a mural of an Israeli security officer and a Palestinian having a pillow fight.
Back in Mayfair, excitement is growing. The ‘new’ version of Girl With Balloon is going on public display at the Sotheby’s New Bond Street galleries this weekend.
Does anyone smell a giant rat? Additional reporting: MARK BRANAGAN