Another Banksy appeared this week, this time on the flank of the Grade I-listed Royal Courts of Justice in London. Naturally, the world’s news agencies leapt to attention. Not because of the image – a judge walloping a protester is the sort of wit you’d find on a novelty birthday card – but because the press can’t resist its favourite pantomime revolutionary. Within hours, it was boarded up and placed under guard. It was later scrubbed off the wall – a rare moment of good sense from the authorities. If only the same fate could befall the rest of Banksy’s wretched oeuvre.
If only the same fate could befall the rest of Banksy’s wretched oeuvre
The other day, walking around Bristol harbour, I was stopped by an elderly mittel-European couple – the husband carrying a moustache that seemed to have wandered out of a Stefan Zweig memoir. I braced myself to direct them to the SS Great Britain, or perhaps the Clifton Suspension Bridge. But no: what they wanted was Girl with a Pierced Eardrum – Banksy’s feeble “riff” on Vermeer, in which the pearl earring is replaced by a yellow burglar alarm. That, apparently, was the pilgrimage: to a tired gag sprayed onto a dockyard wall and vandalised within forty-eight hours of its unveiling.
Banksy’s scrawls draw visitors, not for the pictures themselves, I guess, but for the theatre of subversion that surrounds them. It is the least mysterious secret in Britain – everyone knows the name, the courts have spelled it out often enough – but the myth endures because it pays. His only real genius has been for marketing: fake anonymity and feigned indifference repackaged as rebellion.
Worse still is Pest Control, the official body Banksy set up in 2008 to authenticate his work. Nothing could be less anti-establishment than a committee issuing certificates with holograms and serial numbers. Supposedly it protects buyers from fakes, but the real absurdity is paying six figures for the genuine article. This is what passes for subversion now: outlaw graffiti made safe, stamped, and insurable.
Meanwhile, people cross continents to gawp at this rubbish, and its mere presence sends property prices soaring. Banksy’s work is a kind of reverse Japanese knotweed: it spreads, it clings, it’s almost impossible to eradicate – and instead of dragging values down, it perversely drives them up.
A spray-painted rat is worth more to an estate agent than a new roof. In west London last year, a goat stencil on a wall was enough for experts to predict the building’s value could soar in value. A Banksy mural daubed on the side of a property in Nottingham sold for a six-figure sum in 2021. Have these people lost their minds?
Whole neighbourhoods are blighted by his stencils and yet advertised as “up and coming” because of them. What began as a gimmick has metastasised into a contagious aesthetic malaise. Each time a Banksy appears, the country grows a little dimmer, a little uglier, a little more credulous.
His oeuvre can be filed under three weary headings. First, the bleeding-obvious moral lesson: a girl with a balloon, a soldier frisking a child, policemen kissing – images a precocious twelve-year-old might churn out after discovering Rage Against the Machine on Spotify and the joy of writing “F*** the System” in Tipp-Ex on a blazer.
Second, the clunking animal gag: rats with drills, apes in wigs, pigs in helmets – a zoological menagerie so laboured they may as well arrive with captions.
Third, the stage-managed spectacle: Dismaland, Exit Through the Gift Shop, a hotel in Bethlehem – each billed as subversive, each devoured by the very art-market crowd he pretends to stand aloof from.
The rest is wallpaper: sentimental daubs, property-developer trophies, Instagram fodder.
But as the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Banksy’s one such moment came in 2018, when his Girl with Balloon half-mangled itself in a shredder at Sotheby’s. The reception was ecstatic, though the gesture was as thin and juvenile as ever. The only redeeming feature was the destruction. That should have been the template: every Banksy reduced to ribbons, every stencil wired to explode on sight. Imagine the blessed relief. Rats, policemen and little girls with balloons blasted into confetti, the nation’s walls wiped clean in an instant.
Yet even here the farce deepened. Rechristened Love Is In The Bin, the mangled canvas fetched £18.6million – the most expensive Banksy ever sold. The one time he agreed to obliterate himself, the market rewarded him with a record. Something similar happened with his 2006 screen print Morons, which depicted an auctioneer selling a picture with the words “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MORONS ACTUALLY BUY THIS SHIT.” Intended as satire, it is now itself bought and sold for vast amounts of money.
Enough. The only dignified response to Banksy is eradication. Not Perspex covers, not protective barriers, but proper sandblasting. A national campaign of de-Banksification. Bristol, London, Margate – scrub them all off. Clear the walls. Leave not a rat, not a daisy, not a single self-important chimpanzee behind. If Banksy will not stop humiliating himself, then at least spare the rest of us from the mortification of having to look at it. Erasing his latest mural was a good start. Now, let’s finish the job.
Comments