Banksy (29 page)

Barton is probably Banksy’s least favourite dealer, a man who operates pretty much outside his control and who takes a positive joy in irritating him. Like the other dealers in this world
of urban art whom I met he exists outside the Bond Street comfort zone. He has a Union Jack ring on one finger and one of his daughter’s teeth set in a silver ring on another. In his
reflecting sunglasses, there is about him the air of the jokey, sharp outsider, which he needs to survive. He started out as a photographer specialising in the sort of grainy black and white
pictures that the
Independent
magazine once specialised in – plenty of kudos but not much money. So he abandoned taking pictures and started selling them. He opened his Notting Hill
gallery in May 2006. The idea was that it would be a photography gallery, but then he, like others who were drawn into the art world, ‘just chanced upon Banksy’ and realised he had
stumbled on a gold mine.

The first ever Banksy exhibition in New York, at the Vanina Holasek gallery in December 2007, was billed as ‘Banksy does New York’. Complete with T-shirts on sale for $50 each and
white walls hung with Banksys in a deliberately topsy-turvy style, it was actually nothing to do with Banksy. True, all sixty or so exhibits were Banksys – but they were collected and curated
largely by Barton, who had seen what was happening to the market in England and wanted to reach New York before anyone else did. Banksy’s website said the exhibition was ‘unlikely to be
worth visiting’ and emphasised without any apparent sense of irony that it was ‘completely unauthorised’. The critics did not like it much
either, and on
the Banksy forums fans were outraged. The gallery was heaving every day, but the crowds had come to look not buy. Barely anything sold; however, just by putting on the show Barton had demonstrated
that he could operate outside the artist’s control and it gave him the publicity he needed.

So it seems only natural that if anyone is going to sell street pieces – legally obtained, he likes to emphasise – it is going to be Barton. He says, ‘It’s a sort of
poisoned chalice, because these pieces can sit around for a very long time taking up a lot of space and causing a lot of grief. But in the end the good stuff does sell.’ His argument is that
if he does sell a wall – and he has sold a couple – he makes a good deal of money out of it; but more than that, he says he’s doing it ‘for the fun of it’. ‘He
pissed me off basically with his attitude. How bonkers the whole thing is. He thinks he’s Robin Hood but he ain’t.’

At my last count, seven walls are or have been on his books; two of these, the Liverpool marine ply hoarding and the steel section of a newsagent’s stall from Tottenham Court Road, had
been sold and five were still waiting for a buyer. ‘The reason walls are so very hard to sell is that you are actually asking someone to give you half a million pounds for a bunch of old
rubble with some stencil work on it which they probably will never be able to offload again. And there aren’t many people who like spending that kind of money.’

The first work he sold was a lovely piece: a stencilled boy, clutching a dripping paintbrush in both hands, who has just painted ‘WHAT?’ in giant pink letters on the wall behind him.
Instead of looking triumphant he looks rather sad, as though he does not know the answer to his question and no one else does either.

It sold faster than any other piece, but like most of these walls it has an involved back story. In May 2006 it was painted on the rear of a street stall on Tottenham
Court Road on quarter-inch steel. Once cut out it measured 2.2 metres square. The stall was owned by one Sam Khan, who for thirty years traded in luggage and football scarves and other tourist
essentials. He sold this section of his stall for £1000, which for a very short time sounded like a lot of money, but he soon discovered he had made a disastrous mistake. His story, as he
told it to the
Evening Standard
, went: ‘I don’t know anything about art. I’ve been on the stall all my life trying to make an honest living come rain or snow. I’ve
had people coming up to me saying, “How did you not know who Banksy is?” and, “Why didn’t you go on the internet?” I get up at 5 a.m. and I’m on the stall for
twelve hours a day. I don’t follow these things.

‘The guy who bought it from me came with £1000 cash and intimidated me into it. I was threatened when I asked for time to think and I had to deliver it to a storage depot in
King’s Cross. I’ve never been able to find that man again.’ He said he paid £300 to have the steel panel removed and £300 for a replacement panel, leaving him with a
profit of £400.

‘I have no sympathy for him,’ says Barton. ‘He shot himself in the foot. I had nothing to do with the purchasing of the piece. All I did was display it in Bankrobber and it
sold pretty much the day it went up.’ He was helped by the fact that it had been featured in a paperback edition of
Wall and Piece
, the edition which had come out promising ‘Now
with 10 per cent more crap’, so there was no doubt that it was a genuine Banksy. In addition, it was ‘right in the middle of all the Banksy hysteria and it had press coverage, which
always helps sell something like that because it gives it validation.’ The
Evening Standard
suggested
he might be asking as much as £500,000 for this old
chunk of street vendor’s stall. But he says, ‘I had no intention of asking that, I had no idea what to ask really.’ Like most dealers he is coy about what he got for it, but the
word was that it was more like £230,000 than £500,000. Whatever the final price, Barton is convinced he sold it cheap: ‘The guy who bought it went off skiing and by the time he
came back, in my view it would have been worth twice as much.’ He is equally coy about the buyer, but sources suggest it was bought for Matthew Freud, Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law
although he has never confirmed this.

His second successful sale was a piece known as
Prick
. It’s a clever work in which a museum attendant sits contentedly doing his job, knees crossed, fingers interlocked, guarding a
richly framed picture. But all this security, all the bureaucracy, the guard, his pass clipped to his lapel, his uniform, his cap, his stool, the protective rope railings, are for what? To guard a
picture which simply has the word PRICK spray-painted across it in blue (at some later stage someone sprayed their own tag on top).

Again it was quite easy to secure, since it was on two pieces of marine ply which were being used to board up a shop in Liverpool. Banksy had hit Liverpool at the time of the Biennial
Contemporary Art Festival in 2004 and this piece lasted only about six weeks before a young couple who were visiting the Biennial saw the boarded shop and paid about £500 for the hoardings.
‘They came and sat in the gallery – it was just after all the press for the
What
? piece – and said “We’ve got a Banksy. Do you want to try to sell it for
us?” They showed me what it was and I said “Yes, perfect, bring it in to the gallery and we will put it up and make a big fuss of it.”’ He thought the buyer of
What?
would take this one too. But Barton’s suggested price of £250,000 and the sellers’ valuation of
£500,000 were so far apart that they took it away to
try to sell elsewhere. ‘The piece went round the houses, to God knows how many galleries’ before it arrived back at Bankrobber. He eventually found a buyer for it through Stephan
Keszler, a dealer colleague with a gallery in the Hamptons who had recently rented a space on Madison Avenue. ‘I said “If you want to up your profile give it a try.”’
Keszler managed to sell the piece quite quickly, but it had taken two and a half years to reach this point. Again Barton will not give the price. It is almost certainly under the £250,000
that he was suggesting, and nothing like the price the owners had originally hoped for – but not bad for an original investment of £500.

But if those are the only two wall pieces that have actually sold, what of the others that are on the market? Keszler and Barton teamed up for a huge gamble in the Hamptons in 2011 for a summer
selling exhibition of seven Banksy walls, including a turtle originally painted on a condemned house in New Orleans, the two kissing policemen transferred from the side of the Prince Albert pub in
Brighton and the IEAK wall from Croydon. They even brought two walls –
Stop and Search
, complete with a couple of bullet holes, and
Wet Dog
, shaking like a wet dog does –
to the Hamptons from Bethlehem via England for some restoration. The project almost collapsed – literally – at the Palestinian checkpoint with Israel, where the walls had to be
transferred from a Palestinian lorry to an Israeli one and amid much argument about how best to accomplish the task,
Wet Dog
fell down in a cloud of dust. The back of the wall was damaged
but the shaking dog remained intact.
Wet Dog
was on sale in the Hamptons for $420,000 and
Stop and Search
had a price of $450,000.

Banksy’s unique publicity tour both for the release of his film and for his Oscar campaign has provided a treasure trove for
American collectors. He had a problem
with publicising the film, for as soon as it was released the distributor was pressuring him to rent billboards to help with its marketing. Given that he sees billboards as ‘corporate
vandalism’, this put him in an awkward position; while at one moment he thought ‘maybe a couple won’t hurt’, in the end he shunned temptation in favour of travelling across
America himself, leaving his signature wherever he went. It was far more effective publicity than billboards, because there was always the frisson of a Banksy being spotted in
our
city
– with the added benefit that he had not succumbed to the temptation of actually renting a billboard.

The story of just two pieces from this campaign, one in Los Angeles and the other in Detroit, illustrates the surprising ethical dilemmas that Banksy’s work raised when all the poor man
was trying do was first to publicise the film and then to win an Oscar.

In California a large, derelict water tank had been sitting all too visibly in the hills alongside the Pacific Coast Highway at Pacific Palisades for a number of years. But in February 2011
drivers woke up to something a little different. Someone had stencilled across it in large black letters: ‘This looks a bit like an elephant.’ It was Banksy and very literally he was
right. He had seen what no one else had ever seen, there was a vague intriguing similarity: the tank was cylindrical, and although it stood on six steel legs rather than four animal ones, its spout
had the hint of an elephant’s trunk to it. Within two weeks the elephant was gone or, as one blogger headlined it, ‘Banksy elephant is dead.’ On banksyelephant.com (which
disappeared almost as rapidly as it first appeared) you could even watch a video of the ‘elephant’ first being strung up to a crane in the daylight and then, as night fell, having its
legs cut away by men wielding oxyacetylene
torches before finally being carted away on an American-sized truck.

What made the story even more complicated was that although the tank had not been used to store water for many years, it had housed a homeless man, one Tachowa Covington, whom YouTube videos
show parading around with a crown on his head as though he owned the whole canyon. Had Banksy inadvertently turfed him out? (No, he had moved into a cave further up after a fire in his water tank
home.) Was Banksy making some sort of state ment about homelessness? (No, it was all about the Oscars.)

When the Banksy paintings in Los Angeles were revealed on his website (they were not going to help him much in his Oscar campaign if no one knew they were by Banksy), it was the start of a
treasure hunt to find them, to photograph them and possibly even to acquire them. Christian Anthony, who owns a ‘media design’ company, Mint Currency, looked at the website and knew
exactly where the tank was. Together with his partner in the company, who prefers to be called Tavia D, they persuaded two friends, Jorge Fernandez and Steve Gallion, to join them. These two ran a
waste-disposal company and thus had all the heavy moving equipment they could need.

Banksy hunting is usually a young person’s game: Tavia and Christian are in their twenties, their two friends in their thirties. ‘We saw it as a very special piece,’ says
Tavia. When they actually went to inspect it, ‘We were even more inspired, we wanted it so bad. We were both huge Banksy fans and we wanted to be a part of the whole Banksy movement.’
They were determined to do everything legitimately: ‘Everyone else who was trying to get the Banksys was doing it guerrilla style, going in the middle of the night or whatever, and we
weren’t trying to do that with a huge water tank.’

The history of the tank is complicated, but it had come to the point where although the City of Los Angeles did not own it, they were preparing to have it scrapped when
Banksy suddenly arrived. The four friends bought the tank from the city: ‘We paid thousands of dollars, but not many thousands of dollars for it,’ says Tavia. They then went to work
before anyone else could get to it. Showing Americans’ usual ability to get things done, they arrived at 8.30 in the morning, and within sixteen hours they had cut down their elephant and
sent it on its way to a warehouse to await a buyer.

Tavia D says, ‘We thought, let’s just take it off the city’s hands. We wanted to save that piece of art, we were on a rescue mission.’ They thought the fact that a
homeless man had once lived there made it more symbolic – Banksy perhaps was trying to draw attention to homelessness, the ‘elephant in the room’ – although there is nothing
to suggest that Banksy had any greater clue than they did that the water tank had once been someone’s home. They wanted to be seen as the good guys, safeguarding an important work of art. In
a statement issued at the time on banksyelephant.com, they said: ‘We have personally acquired ownership to preserve and protect the work of Banksy in hopes that it will end up exhibited in a
respected museum where his work will live on without harm.’

There was no doubt, however, that the museum would have to pay good money for this privilege. ‘Obviously we were trying to make a profit, because we had to cover the costs we had invested
to get the piece,’ Tavia admitted. Some of these profits, she said, would go towards helping the homeless. But as they waited for a buyer the storage costs mounted, and she was to find that
selling the elephant was much more difficult than capturing it.