[film reel whirring]
Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[intriguing music]
[tools whirring]
[Narrator] In October 2018, the anonymous street artist
known as Banksy published this video online.
In it, he can be seen preparing a custom frame
for his painting, Girl with Balloon.
The painting is about to be offered for sale at Sotheby's,
one of the world's most exclusive auction houses.
[dramatic music]
I have $30,000 dollars.
Have we got 32,000?
The event was a typical art auction.
Banksy's lot was the last lot of the evening.
The piece sold for over a million US.
Last chance at 850,000 pounds.
The gavel came down, sold, gone, sold.
Selling for 860,000. [bangs gavel]
As the hammer struck,
the work started to fall through the frame.
-[commotion] -[beeping]
And as it did, it shredded.
And everybody witnessed in horror as it was destroyed.
I was like [inaudible]
[grunts]
Street artist Banksy pulled off
one of the greatest pranks in the history of the art world.
It caused a huge stir.
I mean, nothing like that had ever happened.
[speaking in foreign language]
That stunt has already increased the value
of that painting up to $7 million.
It plays on people's fears and emotions
and what true value is.
Where do we place value in society?
Who does art belong to?
He created an art history moment
and wrote himself again into the history books.
[rock music]
[curious music]
[Narrator] The stunt atSotheby's wasn't the first time
that Banksy had ambushed one of the august
institutions of the art world.
15 years earlier, in the winter of 2003,
a mysterious figure entered Tate Britain,
one of the UK's most prestigious art museums
and placed a painting on the wall.
Over the following 18 months, fake exhibits appeared
in London's Natural History Museum, the Louvre in Paris,
and the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
all covertly installed by the same anonymous stranger.
He went through seven different galleries,
putting seven different works of art up in these galleries.
The one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
only lasted two hours, which was understandable,
because it was a painting of a rather posh-looking lady.
She had a gas mask on, and that was spotted very quickly.
But the one in the Museum of Art,
that lasted for several days,
because it was a painting of a Tesco can of soup,
and it looked just like the Warhol cans of soup,
and no one noticed it.
It was a daring thing to do.
He did it, he got away with it,
and everyone suddenly knew his name.
[Narrator] But a name was all the public had.
Everything else remained a mystery.
Who was the secretive artist that had evaded
some of the world's tightest security
to hang his own work alongside that of Monet,
Picasso, and Warhol?
Was he just one person?
Or was Banksy a group of people?
Was he hiding his identity because he was already famous,
someone known to the public, perhaps a musician or actor?
The stunts themselves contained clues.
Banksy had launched anaudacious game of cat and mouse.
At the Tate, he had risked arrest
to bring his art to the public.
In the Met, his piece had been quickly removed by curators
who were sure that it didn't belong in a gallery.
And at Sotheby's, Banksy had performed an act of vandalism.
And it was with vandalism that it had all started.
[loud banging]
[energetic hip hop music]
[Voice Actor] Graffiti hasbeen used to start revolutions,
start wars, and generally is the voice
of the people who aren't listened to.
Graffiti is one of the few tools you have
if you have almost nothing.
And even if you don't come up with a picture
to cure world poverty, you can make
someone smile when they're having a piss.
Graffiti isn't an art form.
Graffiti is a reaction,
an impulse,
is like a spark.
Dynamic, explosive, unpredictable.
Some people say graffiti ruined my life
and some people say graffiti saved my life.
A rush.
It's an addiction.
The rush, I think, is sort of a consequence of it all.
You're scared, and your blood is pumping,
and your adrenaline is pumping.
But really you're doing it for the recognition
and not the rush.
Running round a city and getting your name up
in as many places as you possible can.
The more risky, the better.
You want your name as big as possible in lights.
It's fucking ridiculous, but. [chuckles]
Graffiti is always the heartbeat of society.
It captures what's going on at that time, in that moment.
For every Banksy that's on top and is visible,
you've got hundreds that may be underground and invisible.
[train clacking]
[upbeat hip hop music]
Graffiti emerged in Philadelphia
and then New York in the late '60s and early '70s.
The city was in quote/unquote crisis.
It was a city that didn't have much revenue.
There was a lot of crime,
there was a lot of drugs, a lot of poverty.
Graffiti writing started in neighborhoods
like the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the Bronx,
Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, and it was a movement
started by young kids that were writing their names
with their street numbers on the walls around town
to get recognized in some way.
Sort of a game of tag.
You're actually putting your name on a place
and sort of putting it more and more and more
and exposing yourself more,
and then someone else is coming in,
following you and doing the same thing.
The game exploded when kids decided
to leave their streets and go to the next street
and the next street and the next street
and the next neighborhood and the neighborhood after that.
And it became hugely popular.
The taller and wider people sprayed their names,
then somebody came up with the bright idea
of putting a second color round their name.
And before you know it, the stick letters
of small names on the back of bus seats
had turned into seven-foot-high letters
on the side of subway trains.
And so then it really exploded and became an art movement.
[upbeat hip hop music]
[Narrator] Painting, or bombing,New York's subways system
soon became the primary focus for young graffiti writers
obsessed with having their nameseen as widely as possible.
The nascent art movement developed its own grammar,
rules, and culture, all based around
rendering letter forms, from the tag,
a signature scrawled quicklywith a spray can or marker pen,
all the way up to the piece, a large-scale,
stylized depiction of the artist's name.
In 1983, the public was given its first glimpse
inside the graffiti underground, with Tony Silver
and Henry Chalfant's landmark film "Style Wars".
For many, Style Wars depicted a strange, criminal,
and dangerous subculture.
But for others, it proved to be an inspiration.
It was a new universe that was being showcased.
And it was like, "Oh my god, I gotta get a piece of this."
It became a guidebook for many people.
You know, where it was like
this is how it's supposed to be done.
[curious music]
[Graffiti Artist] People don't know what I look like
until now, until they start going to the movies.
They're gonna see my face.
Big deal.
Traveling round a city on transport, and just like,
"There's my tag, there's my tag, there's my tag."
It makes you feel like you own the city.
It's like, when you paint a train
and you see your train running, you know,
just the terminology: I saw my train running.
It isn't a train that somebody catches to work,
this is my train with my name on it, and it's running.
Graffiti gives this young individual
some kind of ownership when they have nothing.
It's a matter of bombing, knowing that I can do it.
Every time I get in the train, almost every day
I see my name, and I said, "Yeah, you know what,
"I was there, I bombed it."
It's for me, it's not for nobody else to see.
I don't care about nobody else seeing it
or the face if they can read it or not.
It's for me and other graffiti writers that we can read it.
All these other people who don't right, they're excluded.
I don't care about them.
They don't matter to me.
[police siren chirping]
[Narrator] But young writers soon found
that the pursuit of their art
meant facing the full wrath of the law.
As complaints from the public increased,
New York's civil authorities announced a war on graffiti,
described the artists as outlaws,
and linked the prevalence of tags to an upsurge
in other, more serious forms of crime.
I think it's the most disgusting thing
that New York City has.
This station was just recently painted
a couple of weeks ago, and they seem to know
when you're gonna paint the station, and that night
the station will be, end up almost just like this.
[Reporter] Graffiti in New York has become
a deep-rooted social problem
that has bubbled up from the underground
to consume public buildings, road signs, bus shelters,
and, what's even more disturbing, people's homes.
It's just a general and pervasive lack
of consideration for other people.
I think that's the bottom line.
-I think graffiti's-- -To us, it's art.
-What? -To us, it's art, you know?
It's not a crime, but, you know,
if the government give us some right to do,
we could make it look nice, you know what I'm sayin'?
[Interviewee] Like for example,
say you lived in this building.
[Teenager] Yeah, but.
You don't live in this building.
You're comin' into your house,
you're drawing on this guy's house.
This argument that graffiti is bad
and that graffiti should be treated as a blight
and that it should be treated as a crime
became more the accepted point of view.
The legal argument did actuallyhijack the art discussion.
[Narrator] It was an approach that has come to define
the relationship between street artists
and authority ever since and would ultimately become
a central theme in Banksy's work.
Battle lines were drawn,
and the artists were permanently cast
as belonging to the criminal underground.
[Reporter] Mayor Ed Koch signed a law a few weeks ago
that makes it illegal for a merchant to sell spray paint
or broad-tipped markers to minors.
But graffiti writers for the most part
don't buy their paint; they steal it.
Ski One, who writes in Upper Manhattan,
says that, while a friend distracts
the storekeeper, he fills a bag.
You say some kind of can that they don't have,
it could be hard for them to look for it.
By the time they look for it,
I'll have 250 cans, 300 hundred.
-In your duffel bag? -Yeah.
[delicate music]
It could ruin your career, yourfamily, your relationships.
If you decide to be that kind of a person,
that kind of an artist, you have to be
well aware of those consequences.
You want your work to be seen
by as many people as possible.
But conversely, you want to stay as anonymous as possible.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Narrator] Graffiti was only one part
of the broader youth culture that emerged
from New York in the '70s and '80s.
Although it had developed independently,
the art for becameinseparabley linked to hip hop,
a new type of music and dance that, like graffiti,
was an improvised, DIY scene
born of the same desolate urban landscapes:
The Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn.
Style War presented DJ-ing, rapping,
break dancing, and graffiti as expressions
of this same hip hop sub-culture.
When Tony and Henry created this film,
it seemed like it was all together
and it was all this hip hop package.
The young kids that received that from around the world
decided that it was only one thing.
They didn't just do the graffiti,
they didn't just do the DJ-ing or the dancing.
They had to do it all.
[Narrator] Alongside Style Wars,
Henry Chalfant published Subway Art,
a book of the best images from the subway system,
in collaboration with photo journalist Martha Cooper.
The music, book, and film spread graffiti
beyond the perimeter of New York City,
to walls, trains, and overpasses across the planet.
[upbeat hip hop music]
I consider Style Wars and Subway Art
the holy grail of graffiti, right?
I went out and I stole two cans of spray paint,
which I learned became part of the sport of graffiti.
You had to rack your paint.
And I went to my high school that night,
and I had like two cans of white, two cans of red,
and I sat out there, and I was waiting for it to get dark,
and I couldn't even wait.
It was like dusk.
I jumped the fence, went in there,
did this big surf piece, and it was terrible.
I mean, just the ugliest thing you ever saw.
The next day I got to school, and I was all bummed out,
'cause it wasn't like the photos I saw.
But I saw a huge crowd around it,
and everyone was like, "That's so cool!"
And I was like, "That's cool?"
Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant
completely changed the direction of my life.
I was a little kid.
I was down at King's Road.
I went into WHSmith's and I saw this book
called "Subway Art", and it wasthe first thing that I stole.
And it became my bible.
I was like, "Oh my god.
"There's this place where people are painting trains,
"and you don't know that they're trains.
"I need to do this for some weird reason."
Hip hop and rap was being exported from New York.
I was listening to Grandmaster Flash and Sugarhill Gang.
I was kind of into break dancing,
but I couldn't break dance at all.
I wanted to be part of the scene,
so graffiti kind of did it for me.
[energetic hip hop music]
[gentle piano music]
[Voice Actor] I come from a relatively small city
in southern England.
When I was about 10 years old,
a kid called 3D was painting the streets hard.
I think he'd been to New York and was the first
to bring spray painting back to Bristol.
I grew up seeing spray paint on the streets
way before I saw it in a magazine or on a computer.
Bristol is a port.
It's a city built on trade.
Most notoriously, it's trade was the slave trade,
the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Old Bristol was destroyed in the Second World War.
And so the whole demographic of Bristol changed,
because the working-class community
were moved out from the center of town.
And it took a long, long time for Bristol to be rebuilt.
When I was growing up in Bristol in the '70s and '80s,
an awful lot of it was still bomb sites.
And that coincided in the '70s
with the closure of the city docks.
And the center of Bristol became a bit of a wasteland.
A very multicultural city.
In the last 30 or 40 years,
it's been an incredibly creative environment.
If you look at the people who have come out of there.
You have Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead,
that have shaped a new form of music.
You have someone like Bansky that's gone on
and become famous worldwide.
Bristol is big enough to have interesting things going on
but small enough that people connect very quickly
and ideas spread quickly.
Bristol had the opportunity to have a really healthy scene,
a very focused and healthy scene growing
quite quickly in the '80s.
[Narrator] That scene, its art, music, and its politics,
would come to shape Banksy's future career.
In the mid-'80s, however, he was still a young schoolboy,
trying to find out what he might be good at.
Banksy's background is a regular,
middle-class Bristol boy.
I think he got an E in art.
He never went to art school.
But people who studied with him at the time
said he had something in his art work
that they hadn't seen before.
[Reporter] And Mrs. Thatcher out onto the doorstep.
Where there is discord may we bring harmony.
Where there is error may we bring truth.
Where there is doubt may we bring faith.
And where there is despair may we bring hope.
[somber music]
See what they're doing?
[Narrator] The 1980s was a time in which Britain
was rocked by civil unrest and economic turmoil
as the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher
sought to completely reshape the country.
Tearing up the old social contract,
Thatcher launched the capitalist revolution
that placed money and the market
at the center of national life.
Good evening.
Mrs. Thatcher has said it again.
Her government intends to see its economic policy
through to a conclusion.
Industries went out of business.
Parts of the UK, particularly the north and the midlands
were de-industrialized very rapidly
and became like ghost towns.
There was this sort of almost overnight desolation
that descended on a lot of the UK.
No prospects for young people.
Some of them turned to heroin.
It was a bleak time.
Bristol at the time was suffering
from a lot of industries going, unemployment, conflict.
There were riots.
It was, like much of Britain at the time,
quite an unhappy city.
It was still that old British mentality
of Friday night fight night.
And it really was.
It was that kind of, went out drinking on a Friday,
you had a fight, you went home, it was a good night.
Bristol rebelled against the culture of Thatcher-ism.
The idea of everything having a value, for example.
And it manifested itself in the growth
of the alternative culture in Bristol.
And Bristol adopted hip hop, New York hip hop particularly,
as its dominant subculture.
And it's from there, really,
that its anti-authority kind of attitude
seems to have come about, not by design, by accident.
[Narrator] The arrival of hip hop
made a spectacular impact on Bristol's music and art scene.
Clubs in the largely black and Irish community of St. Pauls
began hosting hip hop nights.
And several of the city's sound systems
started to incorporate Emceeing and break beats.
The Wild Bunch sound system emerged
as the dominant force on the scene,
and its nights performing at the Dugout Club
in central Bristol quickly became the stuff of legend.
The Wild Bunch was a group of DJs and rappers.
Out of the Wild Bunch grew Massive Attack.
Nellee Hooper, one of the great producers
of the 20th century worked with Soul II Soul and Bjork.
It was sort of like the training ground
for people who would be defining cultural figures
of the British '90s.
[upbeat hip hop music]
And they were definitely the coolest guys
on the scene at the time,
and a lot of people wanted to imitate them.
Being able to put on a party in a house,
charging 50 P on the door,
hiring a reggae sound system from some guys down the road
who had some really big speaker boxes,
and having an illegal bar in the corner
and filling the house with a couple of hundred people
was relatively straightforward.
[energetic hip hop music]
It was no coincidence that the explosion
of both graffiti in Bristol at that time
and hip hop culture, sound system culture
especially in Bristol, both seemed to
mushroom simultaneously together.
[energetic hip hop music]
[Narrator] The twin art forms of music and graffiti
were personified by the single figure of Robert Del Naja,
a founding member of the Wild Bunch.
Del Naja, also variously known as 3D, Delj, or simply D,
had spend some time in New York during the early '80s,
and when he returned to Bristol,
he brought graffiti with him.
3D was also arguably the UK's first graffiti artist.
He was really a visionary.
He always had his eye on the big picture.
He would wander around and paint full-color,
fully-blown pieces of graffiti in very, very public spaces,
freehand, with very neat outlines,
very precisely well thought out color schemes.
It was like New York had arrived in Bristol.
For us, as kids grown up on estates and everything else,
it's like suddenly you started seeing this art form
that belonged to us for the first time ever.
Like, I'd never been in a gallery.
I'd never gone to a museum.
And then, suddenly started seeing
this kind of visceral art form come out of New York
that was at that time tied in with hip hop as well.
I used to get the bus into town
to travel around to see D's pieces.
3D started painting in 1983.
And not long afterwards, the film Wild Style
was shown at the Art Center Cinema in Bristol.
How can you call people that hang out windows,
and watch trains, Writers, man?
You gotta write!
You gotta do the action, man!
You know, you gotta go there, rack up!
You gotta go out and paint
and be called an outlaw at the same time.
[Interviewee] Myself and a group of friends
sat and watched this window on New York
and all the different aspects of the hip hop subculture.
To then walk out of the cinema and see all this graffiti
with the name 3D and the Z Boys,
which was the crew that he was painting with,
right there and then, it was immediate.
There were a number of crews that started that night
when Wild Style was first shownat the Arts Center Cinema.
[Narrator] This proliferation of budding graffiti artists
coincided with the retirement
of their spiritual leader, Robert Del Naja.
Issued with a final warning by the police, Del Naja
hung up his spray can toconcentrate on his music career.
He went on to form Massive Attack,
one of the most important British bands of the era.
Del Naja was a pioneer.
Alongside him, then you had guys like Z Boys, Ian Dark,
Jafa, Fade, you had Feel It, Inkie, Nick Walker.
Those, for me, were the originals.
[gentle music]
[Narrator] While Robert Del Naja
had been a lone gunslingerroaming the streets of Bristol,
stalked by the police, the wave of writers
who came after him benefited from the appearance
of an unofficial graffiti headquarters
in the east of the city.
Amid the social difficulties of the 1980s
and bleak prospects for most young people,
a local youth worker named John Nation
offered up the walls of his youth club to any artist
brave enough to travel to the badlands of Barton Hill.
[Voice Actor] I'd heard there was a graffiti hall of fame
somewhere in Barton Hill, but my dad
was badly beaten up there as a kid
and had his trousers stolen, so he'd always
put the fear of God into me about the place.
Of course, it turned out to be
the most inspiring stretch of concrete in Bristol.
And I made a pilgrimage there every weekend.
What it showed us was very powerful:
that there was a choice between compromising
and following your own strange little dreams.
Barton Hill was an area which had a terrible reputation.
It struck fear into, if you were not from Barton Hill,
you didn't go to Barton Hill.
White.
Working class.
Hostile to outsiders from the area.
Very territorial.
Strong sense of community.
But also, Barton Hill had a reputation
as being a tough place, and a lot of that
was to do with an older generation of lads
that were predominantly into football hooliganism.
A lot of them were deemed as being
into right-wing National Front.
Barton Hill Youth Club provided a meeting place
for disaffected youth from across Bristol,
kids who were getting into a lot of trouble,
and channeled their energies into a far more creative way
through what John always referred to as "aerosol art."
Two young guys had visited New York,
and they approached me to paint
the external face of Barton Hill Youth Club.
Now, at that time, the front of Barton Hill Youth Club
was adorned with political statements,
National Front emblems, Barton Hill Boot Boys,
Bristol City Service Firm football hooligan crew.
That kind of culture was what was being displayed
on Barton Youth Club at that time.
So, we decided this is something that was fresh,
and the fact that these two guys are Barton Hill locals
and that they want to do this was encouraging.
And that really was the beginnings of laying some of
the foundations for Barton Hill
to grow a huge reputation in the city.
The one place in Bristol where you could paint legally
all day long on the walls of the ball court,
and likely on the outside of the building.
It was bliss.
It was luxury.
We could sit around, take our time.
The other thing that Barton Hill Youth Club had
was that it backed onto the railway tracks.
[Narrator] Painting safely and legally at a youth center
was one thing, but it lacked the glamor
of New York subway art.
The danger, the rush, and, crucially,
the ability to achieve city-wide renown.
The young graffiti writers at Barton Hill
used the club as a staging post
for bombing raids on trains,
buses, and walls across Bristol.
And before long, their names and styles
became a familiar part of the urban landscape.
You had artists like
Inkie, Felix,
Turo, Era,
Chaos, and Shab.
I started painting with a crew called Crime Inc,
and we followed the template set down by 3D
in as much as we would sneak out
after our parents were in bed and go and paint
pieces of graffiti around the city.
And the level of tagging that took over
in Barton Hill encroached on the quality
of people's private and public property.
The auto shop was getting knocked off in Barton Hill.
Proper break-ins.
They managed to find a way in
through the back of the premises and relieve them
of hundreds and hundreds of tins of paint.
Many of the houses that were on the housing estate,
adjacent to Barton Youth Club, their front doors
were tagged, their bins, the local pub,
the wall was absolutely caned with tags.
There was a trail you could follow.
You would know that there was a center
where graffiti was taking place
and that this trail of tags and throw-ups and daubs
led to that one center point, which was Barton Hill.
This antagonized a lot of the local residents.
It got to a point where the council and the police,
British Transport Police, specifically,
were starting to talk to one another.
And they got to a point where they felt
that something had to be done.
A city that can't control its vandals
is seen by many to be a city that's out of control.
[Narrator] In the summer of 1989,
the British Transport Police launched a series of raids
to arrest Bristol's most infamous graffiti artists.
The raids were the culmination of Operation Anderson,
a yearlong investigation into Barton Hill,
the biggest anti-graffiti operation
ever to be undertaken in the UK.
A total of 72 people involved in the graffiti scene
were rounded up and charged with criminal damage.
John Nation was interrogated and pressured to divulge
the real names behind the city's tags.
If he refused to cooperate,
he would be charged with conspiracy,
the most serious offense that the police could allege.
Most of the artists were convicted,
but I didn't divulge oneperson's identity to the police,
and so they charged me with conspiracy to organize
and incite individuals to commit criminal damage.
I had a trust placed in me by those young people
and the confidentiality and the respect
and the bond that I had with those young people
would be the determining factor.
[dramatic electronic music]
[Voice Actor] It might sound a little crazy,
but I think John Nation, that shouty,
red-faced little social worker who made it all happen,
has had more impact on the shape
of British culture over the past 20 years
than anyone else to come from the city.
And I bet none of the cops who arrested him can say that.
So the consequence of Operation Anderson
was that the majority of the writers stopped,
which is what the authorities, of course, wanted.
The other consequence was that those who continued
went completely underground
and lived completely outside the law.
So you had a smaller group of very, very hardcore writers
who were taking on the authorities.
And it was into this vacuum, if you like,
that Banksy emerged.
[curious electronic music]
[Narrator] A generation younger
than the first wave of Bristol graffiti writers,
Banksy showed up on the scene in the early '90s,
where he fell in with one of the crews
that had remained active in the aftermath
of Operation Anderson.
Banksy first appeared working with the DryBreadzCrew,
which the Loki and Kato, Tes.
He was a snotty kid hanging around,
saying, "Can I spray something as well?"
and was largely ignored until he just hung around so much
that eventually they relented, and he started working
with DryBreadz or Bad Apples Crew,
which were essentially the same crew.
I think the probably all came together
around the same time, probably slightly dismayed
that people had actually been able to be put off painting
by what happened during Operation Anderson.
But I'm sure it made a young Banksy
more determined to get his work out there.
They very quickly realized that there
was something a bit special about Banksy
and that this little kid was pretty good
as a freehand artist at that time
and had some really interesting ideas.
A lot of those ideas were aroundthe placement of the work.
Sometimes the pieces which DryBreadz
or Bad Apples were putting up were put up in places
where were quite dangerous for them to paint,
so quite public places.
And there was a reluctance for them to go there,
because they thought they'd be nicked,
until they realized the nextday, when they were on the bus,
that it was directly opposite the bus stop
and at eye level with the top deck of the bus.
And so, he'd thought out where the work
was gonna be most visible,
which is a theme which is really important
to Banksy's work, is where it goes,
whether it's opposite a bus stop
on a busy main road in Bristol,
or whether it's the Walled Off Hotel in Palestine.
The placement of the work is absolutely crucial
to his art, I feel.
When he first started, he was painting letters.
He was, in all sense and purposes, a graffiti artist.
Whether he was a great graffiti artist,
that's debatable in my humble opinion.
He's gone on to progress from being ...
a half-decent graph writer, I would say,
to a totally different conceptual artist
from the guys that he was with.
He was off the radar at that point.
He wasn't one of the knownwriters from Operation Anderson.
The police didn't have his number;
they didn't know who he was,
hence his anonymity was so important to his work.
[Narrator] Banksy's early work suggested
that he was a different breed of graffiti artist.
His pieces often included social comments
or vaguely political messages.
Highly unusual for an art form
that was mainly concerned with letter forms
and striking visuals.
[upbeat electronic music]
Banksy emerged during a time
when British culture was changing.
Following the arrival of house music from Chicago,
the sound systems and free parties of the 1980s
had evolved into large-scale illegal raves
fueled by a new drug: ecstasy.
Shut out of graffiti by Operation Anderson,
many of Bristol's underground artists grifted
into the rave scene, where they continued
to disregard society's established rules.
The state response to rave would be one event
amongst several that directly politicized Banksy.
By the early '90s, the conservative government,
which had always been repressivetowards minority groups
and those outside of the mainstream,
was struggling to maintain its authority.
The poll tax, a new system of taxation
felt by many to be an attack on the poor,
provoked fierce rioting in London,
pit the police against the people,
and led to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.
After John Major replaced Thatcher as Prime Minister,
his government launched a campaign
against groups that he considered
to be socially disruptive.
In 1994, the deeply unpopular Criminal Justice
and Public Order Act paved the way for a crackdown on raves.
It gave the police sweeping powers
to stop and search, evict squatters,
and to take action against a gathering
of as few as five people listening
to what it termed "repetitive beats."
The new law also discriminated against both Gypsies
and Travelers, an itinerant community
that traversed the British countryside in caravans
and was associated with anarchism, environmentalism,
libertarianism, and other radical ideas.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Voice Actor] I got politicizedduring the poll tax riots,
criminal justice acts, and the Hartcliff riots.
That was Bristol's Rodney King.
I can also remember my old man
taking me down to see the Lloyd's Bank,
what was left of it, after the 1980
St. Pauls riots in Bristol.
It's mad to see how the whole thing
of having to do what your told can be taken back
and how few people it takes to grab it back.
[Narrator] Banksy was close to the Traveler community,
who were a large presence in the southwest of England.
The Glastonbury Festival, Britain's annual
summer celebration of music, peace, love,
and alternative living, took place not far from Bristol,
and Travelers were a fixture at the site.
In 1998, he painted this piece,
inspired by hop hop and rave,
on the side of a trailer at the Glastonbury festival.
The smiley face, the unofficial logo of rave,
appears in many of his later stencils.
By the close of the '90s, Banksy, pictured here
during a trip to visit the left-wing Zapatista rebels
in Mexico, had become an artist
for whom message was as important as image.
Certainly in the early days
it's that very kind of simplistic,
left-wing attitude of most of the Travelers,
which, I'm a lifelong Labour supporter,
but I can't stand that Traveling scene,
never could, never will, yeah?
But I can see where bits of that came through to him
in his mentality and the way he thought.
He was reflecting
the anti-capitalism, the anti-authority,
the anti-war feelings which were prevalent
among the Bristol underground at the time,
and a genuine belief that the world
can be changed to be a better, and fairer place.
[Narrator] At the same time,
Banksy was evolving stylistically.
Stenciling, a technique that had notably
been favored by Robert Del Naja,
became an increasingly important part of his work.
[intriguing electronic music]
Something that, if you were doing freehand,
would take you hours, and if you were using a stencil
would take you less than five minutes
and you probably won't get caught doing it.
You have an idea, you have an image, you print it out.
You then project that image
onto a piece of card in your studio.
You cut it out into like a three-layer stencil.
You then walk up to a wall
and you stick the first layer of the stencil on the wall,
which isn't illegal.
And you stand there and you wait for no one to come
and you spray the first card.
And you take it down, give it to your mate,
stick the next layer up, which, again, isn't illegal.
So, it's pretty hard to get caught painting stencils.
Everyone can understand them.
They're not this dense tagging.
You see them, you click immediately.
It's the time that you spend in your studio
thinking of the idea and doing the preparation
is why I think it's slightly better than graffiti.
I think stencils initially were met with
quite a lot of derision.
They weren't taken very seriously.
A graffiti artist would never be caught dead doing that.
That's the main difference, is we would never do that shit.
[Voice Actor] Traditional graffiti artists
have a lot of rules that they like to stick to.
And good luck to them.
But I didn't become a graffiti artist
so I could have other people tell me what to do.
If you're gonna do graffiti,
you've gotta steal your spray paint,
and you've gotta paint trains, and you've gotta tag stuff.
You know, if you want to sit there
in your stagnating graffiti,
it has to be like this, well, then poor you.
Because everything evolves and moves on.
[bright music]
[Narrator] For graffiti, that evolution dates back
to the very early days of New York.
At the time that the hardcore graffiti writers
were bombing trains, work appeared on the streets
and in the subway stations that shadowed
the underground culture of tags and pieces
but was recognizably different.
Together with his friend, Al Diaz,
a young artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat
toured lower Manhattan, writing the tag SAMO,
an abbreviation of "same old shit",
accompanied by thought-provokingslogans and epigrams.
Another young artist, Keith Haring,
was tracking the SAMO pieces
while developing his own form of illegal public art,
drawing chalk outlines of figures and characters
on vacant advertising boards in the New York subway
and attaching mock headlines to lampposts around Manhattan.
Basquiat and Keith Haring were really
the beginning of street art, modern street art,
as we understand it, in that it was taking the tools
and the philosophy, the kind of ethos behind graffiti
but stepping to one side with it.
Statements that have more to do with newspaper headlines
or the kind of posters you'd see outside a church, say.
Looking at the ideas of public space
and how one could create art
that would be seen by a mass audience
rather an elitist audience was kind of the key difference.
Banksy's well aware of the history of the art form
and those kind of key players at key moments.
[Narrator] And for Banksy, there was no influence
more important than the French stencil artist Blek le Rat.
Blek, who had first encountered graffiti
during a trip to New York, adapted the idea of street art
to the European tradition
of stenciling political statements on walls.
His project, to bring socially-conscious
art to the public,
began in 1981, when stencils of rats started to appear
in the streets of Paris.
Blek le Rat's signature wasn't Blek le Rat.
It was the rat.
Rats everywhere, like running around.
And you would see multiple rats on the walls.
He was also painting homeless people on walls.
And so, he basically was an artist that had a message.
His message was: look at these things
that are wrong in the city.
Look at the homeless population.
There's something wrong
that there's so many homeless people.
They're invisible to us.
I'm gonna make them more visible
by painting them on the walls, right?
High art concept, low art technology.
Whereas the graffiti artist may be the other way around,
where it's definitely about, say,
this technical skill with the spray can,
that kind of thing, these intricate letters,
which is great and fantastic, but who are you speaking to,
and ultimately what is the goal at the end?
But if the goal at the end is I really want to,
say, change the world, like I want to deal
with these bigger, headier concepts,
and that's where Banksy changed the game.
He's taken the best of all these different worlds:
the graffiti world and how he operates on the street,
the stencil world in what he creates as an image,
and sort of this social activist point of view.
Three different, say, personality types
packaged into one person.
You have a really high-profile art terrorist
on your hands, right?
[Narrator] In the mid-'90s, a British television program,
Shadow People, captured a young Banksy at work.
The program provides a fascinating insight
into how Banksy was painting around Bristol
in the wake of Operation Anderson
and how he viewed himself as an artist.
The footage also showed that, by 1995,
stenciling, rather than freehand painting,
had become central to his art.
[Banksy] Yeah, I've decided that
I don't ever want to do a gallery show.
Like a proper gallery show. [indistinct]
You know, if somebody came to me with a lot of money,
I'd tell him to fuck off.
And I don't feel the need to go to a gallery
to make my art feel legitimate.
And yet, if I go to the pub and somebody says
that they like what I've just done,
and I might get a beer, or I might meet a girl
that likes what I do, then that's enough.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Narrator] By the close of the '90s,
Banksy had become an important figure
on the Bristol art scene.
Together with the graffiti artist Inkie,
he organized Walls on Fire, a landmark event
supported by the city, in which street artists
legally painted over 400 meters of hoardings
in Bristol Harbor, while sound systems pumped out hip hop.
A few months later, Banksy painted The Mild Mild West,
his first large-scale mural on the side
of an abandoned building in the Stokes Croft area.
The mural soon became an iconic monument
to Bristol's local culture.
I've always seen it as being a welcome to Bristol sign.
It's actually a reference to a particular party
which was broken up by the police,
and it's Banksy's protest, if you like,
against the police taking on the rave scene.
We might be peace-loving, we might just be after
a good time, we might be just trying
to do our own things, but don't push us too far.
It kind of distilled his aesthetic.
Though it was painted freehand,
Banksy stenciled his name along the bottom.
If you take Walls on Fire as a comparison,
he was still painting traditional
mural graffiti up to that point.
The Mild Mild West made it very clear
where he was going from there.
[Narrator] Banksy's direction of travel
was away from Graffiti and towards a career
as a new type of contemporary artist.
In 2000, he graduated from the streets
with a small exhibition at the Severnshed Restaurant
in Bristol.
The show, with its canvasses painted
by an infamous local vandal,
attracted the attention of both public and media alike.
[Interviewer] Excuse me, madam.
You see this bit of graffiti here with the two rats there
and the rat up there with the fellow?
What do you think of it?
[Woman] I think it's most strange.
[Interviewer] Can I just introduce to the man
who actually sprayed that thing?
Would you call him a vandal?
[Woman] Well, I suppose you are being a vandal, really.
[Host] Graffiti had taken Banksy
to cities across Britain as the original street outlaw.
But recently, he's moved to London,
started accepting commissions,
and is now holding a conventional exhibition.
[Banksy] Well, I'm kind of old-fashioned,
in that I like to eat.
So it's always good to earn money.
And also, I'm trying to make canvasses work
better than graffiti can work,
'cause you can take time on it.
Graffiti doesn't always come out the way you like it,
'cause you're rushing, your panicking or whatever.
[Host] Every artist has to develop,
and it's time for Banksy to face new challenges.
That show really caught people's imagination.
People who didn't know his work went there and thought,
"wow, this art talks to me.
"It's radical, it's clever, it's witty,
"it's got a political point, it's well-executed."
I know several people who bought pieces there
who said it was the first time they'd every bought any art.
[soft electronic music]
[Narrator] Though exhibiting in galleries
and working on commission,
Banksy remained active as an illegal artist.
His street work no longerbelonged to the graffiti scene,
but neither was he associated
with the contemporary art world.
Instead, Banksy was part of a new group
of post-graffiti artists who, like Basquiat,
Keith Haring, and Blek le Rat before them,
were experimenting with newforms of unauthorized urban art.
I thought graffiti was gonna change the art world,
shake everything up, and it didn't do that.
It just stayed relatively underground.
The most success that graffiti had was working with brands.
It didn't really make it into art galleries.
It wasn't picked up by collectors.
And as I was becoming more and more disillusioned
with graffiti, this weird thing
called street art started to happen.
Graffiti writers reinvented themselves,
and you had people like Cost and Revs
who started putting wheat paste up everywhere
with all kinds of messaging.
And then you have the emergence of people
like Shepard Fairey, who also saw the potential
of just putting posters,
like rock club announcements of punk announcements.
All of a sudden, these little rats started appearing.
And more people were doing stickers
that weren't based around a skateboard brand.
There was Shepard Fairey, there was Bast,
there was Foul, Banksy, Osgemeos.
People using an opportunity in the street
and turning it into their advantage.
You know, turning bollards into like missiles.
And it sounds, like, corny and shit,
but it was just something different.
There was a bunch of people around the world
that were doing something that wasn't graffiti,
and at the time it didn't have a name.
[ethereal electronic music]
[Narrator] The nascent street art movement
found a home in Shoreditch, a rundown district
in London's East End, where a new underground was thriving.
It was a mixed place where immigrants,
people without much money all could mix.
This whole new street scene began to move in.
Artists went there of all types,because the rent was cheap.
[Narrator] Banksy, now living in London,
was a fixture at The Dragon, a small bar tucked away
in a side street near the Old Street Roundabout
that had become the informal headquarters
of the street art community.
Dragon Bar was this unique, weird place
that was run by a guy called Justin Piggott,
who was an ex-junkie,
but into art, and it was modeledon like a Lower East Side,
kind of divey, skateboardy, graffiti bar.
And at the back of the bar they had this car park,
and we used to put parties in that.
And because it was just that little bit
out of the beaten track, we'd keep it open all night.
We had a license to 11 o'clock, and we'd keep it--
I was serving booze until three o'clock in the morning.
And I just became this lawless weird zone.
It was just like a free-wheeling kind of madness
where everybody knew each other.
You had artists coming in.
You had Faile coming into town, Bast, Invader, Shepard.
All these guys congregated there,
and it was an epicenter, really,
of the beginning of the scene.
At that time, Shoreditch and Tower Hamlets and Hackney,
they were the poorest boroughs in London,
so you could do stuff in the street
and it wouldn't get cleaned off.
And then it was like the whole place
became a wall of fame.
Me and Banksy, we painted all the posters
that used to go on Shoreditch Bridge,
upstairs in the Dragon Bar.
We'd go there, we'd cut stencils, make posters.
And then, two o'clock in the morning,
when we were pissed enough, go out
and jump over railway bridges and paint stuff.
[upbeat electronic music]
[Narrator] Armies of rats, monkeys, and other images
started to appear all over London,
a new type of visual language
that became part of the fabric of the East End
and which locals came to associate
with a single, mysterious name.
[Voice Actor] It's about underground culture.
The things that come up from the sewers.
Like most people, I have a fantasy
that all the little powerless losers will gang up together,
that all the vermin will get some good equipment,
and then the underground will go overground
and tear this city apart.
They'd be like, "Oh yeah,
"I'm gonna go out and paint some rats."
So, "Yeah, we'll come, look out and help you paint."
It was just like, yeah, get some cans of beer
from the fucking, from the kebab shop,
and off on your bikes and cycle around.
It was just fun.
It was like, really likeinnocent and naive and just fun.
We were literally just having a laugh.
I don't think any, maybe Banksy did,
maybe he had more of a plan than the rest of us,
but I don't think any of us thought really had like,
we were just doing it for fun.
It was a really interesting, fun time that was nothing
to do with finance or how much money things cost.
These guys were just doing it for shits and giggles.
It was like, no one at the time thought
they were ever gonna make any money out of it.
They just had something to say.
It reminded me of graffiti.
We were running round, stenciling,
climbing over bridges.
It wasn't about putting your names up there.
It was about putting your imagery up there.
[upbeat rock music]
It was an interesting mix of Traveler,
anarchist, punk, politics,
combined with end-of-the-pier, who were misses,
English seaside humor.
The jokes were easy to get,
and the imagery is accessible and digestible.
Very palatable to the everyday person
to walk by and say, "Oh!
"Okay."
'Cause you don't choose your audience
if you're putting work on the street.
The work is talking to people of all classes,
all creeds, all colors, all religions, all ages.
It didn't make people feel stupid.
The trouble with a lot of art, galleries, museums,
I think it intimidates people.
And this was something that was easy to get,
people could understand, and felt that it belonged to them.
This is art where we're not made to feel stupid.
For the first time, I can like art.
It's that juxtaposition of iconic imagery
that many times we took for granted.
You put that over here, gonna stay this about it,
and then it's like, okay,
now we almost have like this tension-filled
conversation that you just can't walk by.
Now you gotta stop.
Now you gotta think about it.
And you didn't have to pay for it.
There are jokes always like the sign saying
designated graffiti area, or designated riot area.
It makes you laugh and it makes you think
about the issue he's raised.
In Banksy's work, there's a lot
of imagery related to innocence.
There's often children, there's often nature,
animals, things that we associate with people
or things that need to be cared for.
Banksy has a pretty wide repertoire
of recurring figures in his work.
The mice.
They're typically engaged in some weird high jinks.
Apes also frequently appear.
They're often shown to be kind of smarter,
more interesting than humans
that they will probably take over
once we've finished screwing up
the whole world and destroying it.
The kids, I think, show the precociousness that exists,
the joy that exists, the sort of naivete,
the fun that can still exist in the world,
and how children sometimes are oblivious
or even smarter than the adults.
They're a very important piece to his work
and really communicate really strong messages
about where we are as a society.
Then policemen often appear too.
They're shown as figures of authority
who should be questioned.
But they're also shown sympathetically,
people who are in roles of authority
that sometimes they feel a conflict with.
I'm thinking also of the two policemen kissing
and that being something to think about policemen
in a different way, maybe, than we sometimes do.
He is wanting to uphold the beauty and power
and selfhood of the everyday person,
in contrast to institutional systems
that are weighing things down and controlling things.
[energetic rock music]
[Narrator] The street art scene arrived at a time
when the established contemporary art world
had, to some extent, lost its way.
British art and culture had thrived during the '90s.
The conservative government of the poll tax
and the Criminal Justice Act had been swept away
by the wave of optimism that carried Tony Blair into office
and the phrase "cool Britannia" was coined
to capture the sense of pride
in British culture, music, film, and fashion.
-Oh my God! -[laughing]
[Indistinct chatter]
It was all happening in Britain.
There was a new sprit, a new confidence,
and youthful energy.
Britain was swinging again.
[cheering]
Almost like a replay of the '60s, go-getting,
like we're gonna take over the world.
[Narrator] The contemporary art scene
was dominated by the so-called Young British Artists,
or YBAs, a loose grouping of insurgent artists
led by Damien Hirst and celebrated
as daring and rebellious iconoclasts.
But by the early 2000s, coolBritannia had burned itself out
and the YBA's luster had faded.
Big money had moved in.
And for many, it was hard to escape the feeling
that normal service had been resumed.
$1.6 million.
[Voice Actor] The art world is the biggest joke going.
It's a rest home for the over privileged,
the pretentious, and the weak.
And modern art is a disgrace.
Never had so many people used so much stuff
and taken so long to say so little.
Still, the plus side is it's probably
the easiest business in the world
to walk into with no talent and make a few bucks.
The Young British Artists had become the establishment.
Hirst started off as a revolutionary.
He was now the establishment.
[Reporter] Damien, Sarah, and Angus all showed together
in a seminal show in 1988 called Freeze.
16 years later, they're exhibiting together,
but at Tate Britain rather than in a warehouse.
We're no longer YBAs, we're OAPs.
Art had become glamorous, become fashionable.
Charles Saatchi's gallery made it
into an important source of money for artists.
And something had to crack in this,
because this is not what art is supposed to be all about.
And what came out from it was street art.
Street art was always really good
at being the little cheeky chappy
doing that little thing behind your back.
Oh, that's kinda funny.
Oh, he's having a pop at the government.
Your older brother was into Damien Hirst
and your younger brother who's nicking pills
and going raving is into Banksy.
The art world completely ignored it
because it's a populist art form.
And I think the art world hate that.
Populism isn't a bad thing.
It doesn't mean something that's crass and shit.
Sometimes it just means that people like it.
This was like a movement that became powerful
through the people, not through museum's
and galleries and curators.
This was driven by a general love of the art form
by the general population.
[Voice Actor] I'm frustrated by many things,
but trying to get accepted
by the art world isn't one of them.
This seems difficult for people to understand.
You do not paint graffiti in the vain hope
that one day some big fat Tory will discover you
and put your pictures on his wall.
If you draw on walls in public,
then you are already operating on a higher level.
[Narrator] But whereas the YBAs had benefited
from studios, galleries, grants and patrons,
London's street artists had few resources
beyond the beer-stained floor of the Dragon Bar.
For Banksy, a friendship that he had formed
with photographer and fellow Bristolian Steve Lazerides
soon became key to promoting his art.
Steve Lazerides was vital to Banksy's career for a time.
What they did was show that you didn't have to have
a gallery, be attached to a gallery,
to be a well-known, successful artist.
They could make their own gallery.
They could attract people to it through various means
that Lazarides was absolutely king at.
What Lazarides did with Banksy was to establish
a new way of getting art to the public.
[Narrator] The do-it-yourself ethos of the graffiti
and free party scenes carried over
to the project of building a system
for the sale and exhibition of street art.
One of the first installments came in the winter of 2002,
with Santa's Ghetto, an exhibition of work by Banksy
and Ben Eine that went on to become an annual event.
We'd been painting stuff on the street, and ...
I think some of us had websites,
so we were aware of an interest in people
that wanted to consume or buy what we were doing,
but we didn't really have anything for sale
or a way of selling it.
So, we did a Santa's Ghetto party.
And yeah, the first one was upstairs at The Dragon Bar.
A friend our ours, Marcus, was the drunk,
horrible, stinky Santa in the corner.
And yeah, we sold everything for Like 50 quid or something.
It was completely anarchic.
I was walking through Shoreditch,
from the offices to the Dragon Bar with like handfuls
of Banksy prints that would now be worth
millions of pounds, just taking 'em up there.
And yeah, I kind of ran it and sold it,
and it was completely mental.
Take over a building and don't turn it
into an art gallery.
You know, just anti-art gallery, anti-establishment,
and yeah, going back to that punk kind of ethic.
We were selling the multiple canvases.
So, at the time, they cost 250 quid.
So, Girl and Balloon was 250 pound for a canvas.
And he painted them all in the upstairs of where we were.
So we had like 25 canvasses laid out.
As he was spraying them, I was numbering them,
then he'd sign them, and then we'd take 'em downstairs
and sell 'em as were going out.
And that was the whole idea, really, in those early days,
was to make, again, affordable art for people.
[Narrator] And public interest
in the movement was soaring.
Work that in earlier times might have been seen
by only a handful of people who passed it on the street
could now be preserved and shared online,
greatly enhancing the profile of the artist.
Banksy was clearly emerging
as the most prominent of the street artists.
At a time when youth culture was turning
its face against governments on both side
of the Atlantic and protesting the war on terror
and invasion of Iraq, Banksy's antiwar,
anti-authority agitprop chimed with the popular mood.
The war was very important to Banksy's development.
The no war or wrong war arts
very much came from that period.
It was a perception that New Labour and Tony Blair
had let down the generation, the post-Thatcher generation,
the same people running society.
And Banksy and his generation
I think very much came out of that.
There's a real distrust.
I think you could see a lot of the spirit
of that '80s and '90s underground scene
in a lot of his earlier political work, definitely.
And that's finally what struck a chord
with the vast majority of the British public
who tapped into the Banksy phenomenon, was that spirit.
He was able to articulate a lot of things
that people were thinking but not having
the same wherewithal or the tools,
or the ingenuity to say this is what it is.
[somber electronic music]
[Narrator] In the summer of 2003,
Banksy staged his breakthrough exhibition, Turf War,
a collection of his street work, sculpture,
and vandalized live animals, some of which
were painted in homage to graffiti folklore.
[Reporter] Cattle, pigs, and sheep
are the latest raw material for this man.
He calls himself Banksy, but that's not his real name.
He's a graffiti artist,
and he believes that anonymity is essential.
[Banksy] I'm disguised because you can't ...
You can't really be a graffiti writer and then go public.
It's like the two things don't quite go together.
[Narrator] The event caused a sensation in London,
with celebrities jostling to get in
and the media crowning Banksy
the UK's most feted underground artist.
The Turf War show was hilarious.
It was like in this huge squat up on Kingston Road.
And the thing with Banksy is like,
even in those early shows,
wherever he did it, in whatever period,
they were always supremely well-attended.
It was just chaotic.
There were queues outside,
models trying to get in, everyone trying to get in.
And the RSPCA was tipped off
that he was being cruel to animals.
[Reporter] Banksy fears not the critics
but the inspector from the RSPCA,
who's come to see if the animals are being maltreated.
The farmer from Somerset whoowns the animals has no qualms,
but will the animal welfare man agree?
The artist and the farmer have assured me
that they've been painted
using animal identification sprays, which is non-toxic,
washes off very easily, so there's gonna be
no harm done, even if the animal licks itself.
[Banksy] It's hard to make an entertaining picture
at the best of times, but at least if you have
something that kind of wanders around and licks its nose,
and urinates in front of you, then it's gonna make
the picture a bit more interesting, right?
[Reporter] Despite having a proper exhibition like this,
Banksy insists he's still a graffiti artist.
There are graffiti artists trying to climb into the pound
to spray the cow, and trying to explain to them
that it wasn't actually spray paint on it;
it was animal dye.
And then we had a animal rights protestor
that came up and chained herself to the scaffolding.
What she didn't know, that all we had to do
was kinda undo the thing and slide her handcuffs off.
But we left her there all day,
'cause we thought it was a good look.
We gave her some food and some drink and everything else,
and then she quite politely, at the end of the day,
kinda packed up and went off.
That was the one really that kinda kicked off
that kinda big show mentality with multiple things going on.
You had pigs, you had sheep, you had cows,
you had two vans up on top of each other,
in a squat in the middle of nowhere.
It was only on for three days,
and thousands of people turned up.
This was the exhibition that established him,
that meant that street art was a phenomenon
that had to be recognized.
He just had like this great vision
to be able to put on shows that weren't
in white-walled spaces and to show people
that art could be viewed in a different way.
And I think, yes, on that level I think
he was one of the forerunners to do those kind of shows.
But at that point in time it wasn't even a movement.
It was just us running around doing stuff.
[Narrator] That was about to change
with the founding of Pictures on Walls,
another step in there-imagining of the art economy.
A print house started by the artist Jamie Hewlett, Banksy,
and Steve Lazerides, with Ben Eine as the printer,
Pictures on Walls aimed to bring together
street artists from around the world
and make their work accessible to the general public.
I went to pick Banksy up from Bristol.
He diverted me.
We went to some print place to pick up some prints.
So it was a stack of Rude Copper prints.
And I'm like, "What are you gonna do with them?"
He said, "I'm taking them to the anarchist book fair,
"and I'm gonna sell 'em for a fiver each."
And I was just like, "You're an idiot.
"I'll buy 'em and I'll sell 'em for 20 quid.
"Come on, we can do better with it than that."
And then he kinda came up with the concept
of Pictures on Walls.
And again, the whole ethos of Pictures on Walls
was to make cheap, affordable art for the masses.
I was always into the American screen print system,
whereby you'd have artists like Frank Kozik and Coop
that would design gig posters for Beastie Boys, Nirvana.
And every time the Beastie Boys did a gig
as they toured across America,
there would be a poster that you could buy for 30 quid.
People were producing these really affordable,
fucking cool, what I consider to be cool,
pieces of art by people I consider to be artists,
and you could buy them really, really cheap.
And the only screen prints available
that you could get in England were like for high art.
And I wanted to try and do something
that was more based on the American gig poster system.
And that was kind of the idea
behind Pictures on Walls when we started it.
And again, in that kind of not knowing what we were doing.
So, we were making print runs like 600 and 750,
not knowing that that wasn't really considered
a limited edition.
But, you know, still went on and did it
and then started sucking in other artists
to work on it as well, like Invader, Motoo.
So then everyone got involved, and suddenly
it was like a focal point for the movement
about picking people to come and do prints.
[energetic electronic music]
You know, no one was earning money back then,
so you do a print with Pictures on Walls,
you could earn like six grand.
You know, which was a lot of money back then.
So, I saw it as a way whereby
I could make these artists money
and do something that I thought
was kinda quite important and showcase their work.
And the first print I did was a print
by an artist from Norway called Dolk.
And it was a Labrador fucking R2-D2. [chuckles]
Really high-brow stuff we were doing back then. [chuckles]
[Narrator] Although simple in concept,
Banksy and Lazerides' activities were,
at the time, revolutionary.
The street art movement had managed
to bypass all the established structures
for producing, exhibiting, and selling works of art.
And as Lazerides established himself as an art dealer,
Banksys became increasingly valuable properties.
Banksy's pretty good and kinda like working people
and getting into different crowds and different scenes.
You know, Jude Law.
And all of a sudden Jude Law was coming down
and giving us 10 grand for a painting.
Almost like drug dealers, at that point.
They were great people to buy art.
There was loads of cash. [chuckles]
They thought this art movement was cool.
They understood it a lot more than the YBAs.
It was affordable.
And we were the cheeky little shits running round London,
and people want to buy into that.
We had no idea what we were doing.
Pricing wise, I just made it up as we went along.
So, my theory was, if someone had 500 quid,
they've probably got 1,500, so if we did something
at 500 quid and it sold out,
next time round it would be 1,500.
And then it was like, well if they've got 15,
then they might have 5, and it just jumped like that.
And in the end, when it started to get
to like tens of thousands of pounds, I could only do it
if I didn't say the full amount that the piece cost.
It was like, "Oh Christ, if I tell 'em it's 15 grand,
"I'm just gonna burst out laughing."
And it was like, "Yeah, mate, it's 15."
We made it quite difficult for people to buy pieces.
And like I said, it was like, I had no plan.
I never wanted to open a gallery.
It was just, we just made it up. [chuckles]
[curious electronic music]
That winter, Banksy entered Tate Britain,
placed a painting on the wall,
and walked into the history books.
With the incursions in museums and galleries
and other stunts that followed,
Banksy pioneered a new type of illegal performance art,
and, in doing so, he began to transcend
the street art scene.
What really set him up was his interventions in galleries
in New York, London, and Paris.
That suddenly gave him the publicity that was needed
to make him into an artist that everyone knew who he was.
Careful planning.
Those were almost like a bank job.
You know, you'd sit and plan it out,
work out how it was gonna work.
If you think that he took a box that was this size,
with a freeze-dried rat in it,
drilled into the wall in the middle of the day
in the Natural History Museum during half term,
and put this piece up on the wall.
It's not just Banksy; there is a team,
although it's Banksy who's got to face up
to putting a picture on the wall
and possibly getting arrested.
One of the gallery invasions, some of his team
staged a sort of gay tiff, an argument going on
so that there was a disturbance,
which allowed Banksy to go an put a picture on the wall.
Once they'd set things in motion,
I was always maybe like 20, 30, 50 feet away
kind of photographing everything,
thinking there's nothing I can do
to tip them off or stop it if they're about to get caught.
To focus attention on somebody who was anonymous,
and so you've got a dilemma there immediately.
It also confirmed hisrelationship with the art world,
as being an outside, as someone has not,
didn't have access to galleries.
It owes a lot to graffiti, going into Disneyland
and handcuffing a Guantanamo prisoner to the railings
and getting out without getting caught.
The stakes are much higher, andthe audience is much bigger.
But the thinking is largely the same, I think.
I think Banksy was becoming a different kind of an artist.
He became this sort of hybrid street artist,
social activist, ad hacker, graffiti guy all into one.
[intriguing music]
[Narrator] In 2005, Banksy embarked
on his most eye-catching project yet.
Accompanied by Ben Eine, he traveled to the Middle East
to paint the West Bank barrier.
A controversial wall erected by the Israeli government,
the barrier separated the Palestinian territories
from Israel and was felt by many to be a supreme injustice
aimed at annexing Palestinian land
and subjugating the population.
[blasting]
In traveling to Palestine,
a territory under military occupation,
Banksy combined his flair for highly-planned,
audacious and risky stunts with his use
of striking imagery and sense of social mission.
The collection of paintings that resulted
were met with international acclaim.
We wanted to got to Brazil,
because none of us had been to Brazil,
and the girls were really fit in Brazil,
and all of our girlfriends put their foot down,
said no, you're not going to go to Brazil.
There was three of us at the time.
No, you're not gonna go to Brazil.
That's ridiculous. [chuckles]
So, fundamentally, the biggest wall in the world,
and it seemed like something
that was continually in the press, always a problem,
the most religious ...
crazy, insane hotspot,
and the biggest wall in the world.
So, as a bunch of people that liked painting walls,
perfect destination.
I think we probably spent two weeks there,
and we painted a load of stuff,
and none of it was particularly political,
which is why we got away with what we got away with.
We'd go and paint, and the soldiers would come up.
They'd point guns at us, just ask us questions.
We'd be like, "Oh, we're idiot artists from London."
And then be like, "Okay, go now, go now."
And we'd be like, "Yeah, can we just quickly finish?
"It'll be finished in like two minutes."
And they'd be like, "Okay, finish.
"If we see you again, we get you arrested."
And then we'd drive like 20 miles
down the road or something.
The challenges were getting stuff into the country
and getting stuff out of the country.
Getting the photographs and the memory sticks
and the laptops out of the country.
Getting ladders, getting a car,
finding somewhere to stay.
We stayed in this hotel,
and no one had stayed there for like three years.
I think we did quite a few workshops
with the local kids in Palestine.
So we used that as a bit of an excuse
to get art equipment in.
There's not a Montana shop in Palestine,
so you can't just get your mom's credit card
and order a load of shit online
and it turns up the next day. [chuckles]
This idea of upping the stakes
and challenging yourself to go one step further.
He's produced some of his best work.
The work that Banksy created in Palestine in 2005
was very powerful.
The ones that I remember are as if the wall,
the barrier between Palestine and Israel,
were cracked open and you could see through it,
but you see paradise.
You see blue skies, you see nature, you see children.
And that really was such a stark difference
from the Palestinian plight of what was happening there.
Looked nothing like what he painted.
Certain people were becoming a lot more kinda like ...
understanding the way that the PR machine works.
So it wasn't until we came back
that those images became political.
And there was the message behind what we were doing.
If Banksy painted a big wall in London,
then maybe the arts editor in the Guardian
would write something about it on one of the back pages.
But this was one of the first times
when it actually kind of blew up.
I think the first trip to Palestine
elevated him to being a more serious artist
than perhaps anyone had taken him for,
because, don't forget, this was only two years
after he'd been into galleries,putting art on walls.
And here he was, saying, yes, I can joke around like this,
but I've also got, I've got serious points I want to make.
[Narrator] The plight of the Palestinians
would become a recurring theme in Banksy's life and work.
And in 2007, he held the annualSanta's Ghetto in Bethlehem.
[Reporter] The underlying message is that people
should come and see the harsh daily reality for themselves.
And some Palestinians are impressed.
[Palestinian Man] Actually, I like the towers.
[Reporter] Towers, the little towers.
Yeah, the little towers.
-I like them. -Why?
Because I see them everywhere
where I travel in the West Bank.
But it's the first time that I see them in a colorful way
or something like--
I wish that the Israeli army is influenced by this.
[Narrator] Eight years later, Banksy journeyed to Gaza,
where he made a two-minute film that drew attention
to the devastation caused by recent Israeli air strikes.
In 2017, he opened the Walled Off Hotel,
a dystopian art installation
that marked the hundred-year anniversary
of British control over Palestine.
The strongest work that Banksy has done in Palestine,
for me, is the Walled Off Hotel, in Bethlehem.
This is a hotel that he calls "the hotel
with the worst view in the world,"
in that it overlooks the Israeli wall
that they built to separate Palestine from Israel.
It mocks that whole Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
You walk in, and there is a reflection
of the part that Britain played in this,
with the sort of colonial lobby
with a piano that plays concert music.
You've got Banksy pieces of art all around the lobby.
And you then go from that sort of colonial past
into a museum which goes through the whole history
of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
And then you've got these rooms, one of them painted
by Banksy, a couple of them painted by others.
I just think, as a work of art,questioning what's going on,
reminding people of what'sgoing on, it's a fabulous piece.
[Voice Actor] I don't want to take sides,
but when you see entire suburban neighborhoods
reduced to rubble, with no hope in the future,
what you're really looking at is a vast,
outdoor recruitment center for terrorists,
and we should probably address this for all our sakes.
This guy, who doesn't live in this country,
traveled all the way over there,
and took it upon himself to make a statement
concerning a people that are not his people,
an injustice that's not necessarily his injustice.
And so, he painted with great clarity
what people around the world could imagine
are the dreams of the Palestinian people.
It showed how powerful street art could actually be
if you have the proper context and if you gave a shit.
[upbeat rock music]
[Narrator] The paintings on the Israeli separation barrier
earned Banksy a global following.
And in 2006, he opened his first
major exhibition outside Britain.
Entitled Barely Legal, the show was designed
along similar lines to Turf War.
It was staged in the inglamorous surroundings
of a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles,
featured a live, painted animal, this time an elephant,
and attempted to bring Banksy's alternative concept
of what an art show could be to an American audience.
Banksy doesn't do exhibitions.
The whole thing is an experience
I think it made a huge impact.
It think that it really showed people
that, yeah, we can do this, and there is no limits.
We don't have to go to a gallery
and listen to what they say about
you have a white wall, this is your space, you do it.
Now you could say, nah, I'm not gonna do that.
I'll go do my own thing.
We opened.
It was insane.
We didn't know anyone, so I made everyone queue,
so the only people that we'd let in
ahead of everyone else were Dennis Hopper,
'cause he's the only person I recognized,
and Sacha Baron Cohen.
So it's like we had studiobosses and all sorts queuing up.
It was a huge success.
A lot of work was bought.
The suggestion was that Banksy sold
three million pounds worth of art, which nowadays
doesn't seem like a huge figure, but then it was.
Hollywood royalty was there.
It was a sort of sensation.
Suddenly like everything's bathed in blue light
and flashbulbs are going off.
I'm like, "Christ, what's going on?"
And then, next thing I see is Brad and Angelina
getting out of a car.
Now, they'd not been seen in public together
for almost a year, so they turned up to the show.
Suddenly, there was this exhibition of an artist
no one had heard of in America much.
And it was the thing to do, it was the place to go,
the place to be seen, the place to buy.
[Narrator] But the place to be seen and the place to buy
was not where street art had started.
And the success of Barely Legalbrought with it a problem.
Although Banksy was at pains to ensure that his shows
were light years from thetraditional gallery experience,
they nevertheless remained art exhibitions.
The original concept of street art,
images place anonymously and illicitly in public spaces
as free art for the masses
had nothing to do with guest lists,
celebrity, glamor, and hype.
Street art is the whole thing.
It's everything about site, location.
It is a democratic art form.
It's about feedback.
It's all these other things that happen.
Site-specific.
A lot.
But then you have to take a bite-size piece of that,
and that goes over here.
Right?
And so then, does it change?
Yes.
Can it be authentic?
Not in the same way.
When he blew up here in the States,
it's because Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt bought his work.
That was like, whoa.
Who are they buying and what are they collecting?
And we should probably follow them,
because we have no minds of our own
and we only follow celebrities.
Banksy said it weirded him out.
He said he couldn't sell another painting
for the next couple of years.
He enjoys some of it but doesn't like
what comes with it some of the time.
When I was at the airport, I saw it
either on the Banky show's on the front cover of whatever,
like, OK!, Hello, and you're like, wow,
this has just gone nuts.
[energetic music]
[Narrator] Banksy's soaring profile
completely upended the established order
in the art world.
Together with Steve Lazerides,
he had managed to create a system for art
that was entirely independent of the galleries,
auction houses, museums and financiers,
but which they could no longer ignore.
The phrase "The Banksy Effect"
started to appear in the media,
used to describe the explosion of interest
in a collection of previously obscure underground artists.
We didn't engage with the art world,
'cause we didn't need to.
I don't think anyone had any intention
to want him to be part of the art world.
If you think that most of these guys,
it was more of a stick it to the man
kind of attitude rather than, oh,
let's try and get into the Tate.
When did the contemporary art movement
start taking notice of street art?
When the press and magazines were writing about street art
more than they were writing about Damien Hirst.
And then you see Damien Hirst collaborating with Banksy.
These people aren't stupid, are they?
Street art had to be looked at.
Art critics had to look at it.
That it was work that should be seen as proper art,
not some vandal just putting up a bit of paint on a wall,
and it should be considered and thought about
and shouldn't be just painted over.
[gentle electronic music]
[Narrator] By 2008, street art was a feature
of urban landscapes across the planet
and had become the most significant
art movement of the 21st century.
The key figures in this movement were Shepard Fairey
with his Obey poster and his Hope poster,
which was a significant part
in the Obama presidential campaign.
Faile, the art collective.
Sort of beautiful work.
Very intense, intriguing work.
Ron English, who would change adverts
in an entertaining way.
Swoon, one of the few women graffiti artists,
who'd paste up her wood cuts.
RETNA in Los Angeles, who was more graffiti
but was very strong.
Ben Eine.
Pure Evil.
Invader, a French artist, named after Space Invader.
He put these small tiles in cities across the world.
People like that were making the difference.
The Banksy effect has kind of leveled out
the playing field.
So it's like, if an individual says,
I can't afford six figures to get an actual Banksy,
but I could go and support this other local artist
or this other artist who does work
that they may like that's similar, whereas 10, 20,
30 years ago, that conversationsimply didn't happen.
Banksy truly believed that this is an art movement,
and the bigger you can make this movement, the better,
and if you can make it a global movement.
And I think he always tried to position himself
as the leader of this movement,and he's achieved that.
If you think about it, since the YBAs,
there's been no other new movement of art
outside of what the graffiti scene has been doing,
and it's probably one of the most powerful art forms
globally and has millions and millions of followers.
[ethereal electronic music]
[Narrator] The worldwide growth of street art
inevitable attracted money, big money.
After Christina Aguilera bought a Banksy original,
the price of his work doubled overnight.
Banksy auctions at Sotheby's saw record bids,
with sales reaching many time their upper estimates.
Having suddenly discovered street art,
collectors now clamored to buy up as much as they could.
It was like a new fucking gold rush.
It was mental.
We put a Faile show on at Greek Street,
and people were literally
like fighting each other to buy the paintings.
We did a Micklef show in Los Angeles,
where we opened the doors, and people literally ran at us
to come and buy the paintings.
It was insane.
And, you know, I think this had been whipped up
by the commercial art world as well
buying stuff and suddenly seeing
the returns that you could make on art.
When people buy art today, it's not always based on
what art they're drawn to personally.
At the highest echelons of the real super rich,
it's often because of what is ...
considered valuable at the time.
See, that is ...
part of the quandary.
You're dealing with artists
who essentially give their work away,
and now you're trying to commodify pieces of it.
And that is a challenge.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,
and a very warm welcome to Sotheby's.
The money was just a byproduct.
No one was going out to kinda make money.
We were just trying to keep up
with the people that were buying it an flipping it.
So, it was like, well if we charged bloody 250 quid,
and they're charging 20 grand for it,
then we're being idiots.
But I think that, ultimately, it's been the thing
that's, at the moment, destroying the scene,
because I think people are justlooking at it as a cash cow.
And, you know, all the artists I ever work with,
none of them went into it for money.
JR, Invader, all these guys,
they went into it 'cause they wanted to say something.
[energetic electronic music]
[cameras snapping]
[Narrator] The trade in prints
and original canvases intended for sale was one thing,
but after people began to remove sections of walls
that had been painted in the streets
and then offered them for sale at auction,
Banksy moved to try to exert some control
of the market in his work.
He established Pest Control, an organization
that would issue valuable certificates of authenticity,
or COAs, only to certain of his works,
leaving the remainder difficult to sell.
What does that artist want to do with it, you know?
And I think if the artist wants it to be
in a gallery, that's fine.
But if he doesn't want it to be in a gallery,
that's not fine.
Banksy's dealt with this a lot, right?
His stuff gets stolen, and it's an issue.
But I think he's come up with a solution, right?
He doesn't give it a COA, so it really has no value
in the high art institutions.
There are still gold diggers out there
that are grabbing it andselling it on the black market.
I'm sure that'll last for a while.
But eventually, people are gonna realize
that the end game's not worth it.
The pieces that we sell at Bottoms
are the pieces that have been purchased,
they come with certificates,
there's a very traceable element
of a traceable history, if you like, to them.
So, absolutely not encouraging people
to remove the pieces from walls.
Street pieces are street pieces.
They were created and gifted
to whatever city they're in.
I think takin' 'em off the street is morally wrong.
They were created for the people to get enjoyment from,
not for like one guy to go an pay someone 50 grand
to chop his wall off and then try
and sell it to a billionaire.
It's wrong.
[Narrator] Nevertheless, that billionaires
were interested at all showed how far graffiti had come.
In 2008, Banksy held the Cans Festival
in a tunnel under London's Waterloo Station.
A celebration of the movement, over 40 of the world's
most famous street artists were invited to participate.
With an estimated 30,000 people queuing to get in
over the May bank holiday.
A year later, Banksy returned home
to stage Banksy vs. Bristol Museum,
his largest exhibition to date.
The show was organized in partnership
with Bristol's city council,
once enthusiastic participants in Operation Anderson
and scourge of Bristol's graffiti artists.
Banksy's fantasy, that the rats, the powerless losers
might one day get some good equipment and take over
had finally been realized.
For me, the best of Bansky's exhibitions
is Banksy vs. the Bristol Museum.
This was a museum that was not getting
a great deal of support from Bristolians.
But than Banksy started hanginghis work next to pieces,
and suddenly the museum came to life.
What was so outstanding to me was the way it expanded art.
It brought in people who never
would have gone to that museum,
who were seeing work that existed in their city
that they probably knew nothing about,
quite apart from Banksy.
And, of course, it was Banksy.
It encouraged people to explore the museum
and look at the collection in ways they hadn't before.
Putting a sex toy in amongst the stalactites
and stalagmites, and putting a pipe with weed
in amongst the collection of ceramics, all those things.
I followed this elderly couple around,
and I was struck by the fact they were laughing.
And it's not very often you hear people laugh
in art shows and museums.
Putting a cordon around the gypsy caravan,
it made a serious point about Travelers
and the plight of Travelers in the way
that that caravan that's been in Bristol Museum
for many, many years has never been able to do,
just changing and flipping the context.
The combination of the animatronics,
the interventions in the museum itself,
the large-scale models like the ice cream van
and the gallery space which is always used
as a gallery space in the museum being used as a kind of
a retrospective, complete with a mock-up of his studio.
It was a really bold statement about where he'd got to.
And to do it in Bristol was great.
It was really good for Bristol.
[Narrator] The concept of popularizing art,
making it accessible to the public
by rethinking the context,
started to inform much of Banksy's work,
which moved away from the amusing street stencils
and into landmark artistic statements
along the lines of Bristol Museum.
In 2015, he opened Dismaland in Weston-super-Mare,
a seafront holiday resort not far from Bristol
that had fallen on hard times.
Billed as a bemusement park, Dismaland was visited
by over 150,000 people in little over a month,
all of whom had come to see an art exhibition
reimagined as a drab, miserable,and hostile amusement park.
Dismaland was a legacy of the museum show, I think.
It exemplified so much of what Banksy's about:
the humor, the quality, the ambition.
It was also partly about the artists he really liked.
He had 60 other artists exhibiting there.
What was interesting was that they came
from across the world from where Banksy had met them,
so you had Palestinians and you had Israelis.
Everyone was seeing art they'd never seen before.
There were all kinds of things going on there.
The union banners, the squattingand housing action groups
which were represented there, the annexist groups
which were represented there, it was a wonderful thing.
I don't think any of us really expected him
to create something quite as magnificent as Dismaland.
It's as if Jeff Koons was a graffiti writer.
Right?
And he had the resources to do
whatever the fuck he wanted to do.
Well, that was Banksy.
In his core, he was still a street graffiti guy
who understood communication to the masses.
High production value for the common man.
He's become the people's favorite artist.
He is more, though, than just a people's artist;
he's an artist who isquestioning the whole art scene,
which we are all part of, actually,
and the whole money for art, and the whole glamor for art,
and the way art is being used
as more than just pictures on walls.
And it's that questioning and that clever questioning
that I think is important.
[Narrator] Those questions surface persistently
in Banksy's art.
His 2010 documentary film, Exit Through the Gift Shop,
explored how art is marketed
by transforming a clothes shop owner named Thierry Guetta
into a celebrated street artist
from whom people were prepared to buy
millions of dollars of his work,
irrespective of its quality.
Conversely, a stall that Banksy set up
in New York's Central Park, offering his work
for $60 a piece failed to do much business.
Without the art industry to hype them,
the canvases were largely ignored.
A tourist from New Zealand who purchased two pieces
at the stall was later able to sell them for $125,000.
Through it all, he's able to make us laugh at ourselves,
this machine of the art world,
and I think also laugh at himself.
[Narrator] This type of performance art
was as much commentary on what Banksy had become
as it was on the art economy.
With his status as the world's most famous artist,
Banksy was now inescapably part
of the over-inflated, commercialism, fashion,
and celebrity of the mainstream art world.
In a rare interview, he openly wondered
whether he had become part of the problem.
His celebrity was enhanced by his much-prized anonymity,
a further paradox that reached back
to the early days of graffiti, in which the writers
simultaneously sought citywide fame
and yet carefully hid their real names.
Ever since he was filmed at Tate Britain,
the public had been able to associate the name Banksy
with a real figure, not just an army of rats
and monkeys stamped across British walls.
And yet, his true identity remained out of reach.
For some, the hunt for Banksy became an obsession.
Journalists, academics, and amateur detectives
scoured public records, business data,
and archives in Bristol.
Some even mapped the appearance of Banksy's pieces
around the globe, correlating them with Massive Attack
performances and confidently announcing
that Banksy had been none other
than Robert Del Naja all along.
Others concluded that Banksy was a phantom,
that whoever he might have once been,
the name and mystery were now just part
of a well-designed publicity campaign.
Perhaps this was the point about street art,
a democratic force started by kids
with nothing but marker pens and spray cans.
The world's most famous artist could be anyone.
The anonymity with Banksy was never
a kind of marketing thing for him.
I think it was self-preservationrather than self-promotion.
And I think it just became so ingrained in his soul
that I don't think he'll ever go.
It adds a mystery, an aura.
You can't really divorce that from the work, I think,
in how it's understood.
It's a great story to now know who he is.
Even when people know who he is,
they don't want to know who he is.
It's a better story not to know.
The theories sort of go on and on.
Researchers can spend days, weeks, years
deciding this proves it's someone else.
This is part of the game.
[Narrator] In 2018, Sotheby's auctioned Girl with Balloon,
a work originally conceived as cheap art for the masses.
[Auctioneer] 200,000.
[Narrator] It's final price was 1,042,000 pounds,
a figure that had been driven ever higher
in part to the enduring mystery
surrounding the world's most famous artist
and the persistent question of who he might be.
[bangs gavel]
[cheering]
As the gavel came down,
and London's elite started to applaud,
the public finally received their answer.
[beeping]
He was a vandal.
[commotion]
[Auctioneer] Ladies and gentlemen,
we are in the middle here.
Sorry, if I could have your attention.
[energetic rock music]