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Banksy Bristol City Museum Show, by Deleted on Jul 6, 2009 13:18:22 GMT 1, from The Times, September 20th 2006, Banksy hits the big time. In just seven days the British graffiti artist conquered LA,made millions and even wowed Brad Pitt
I donโt know precisely who Banksy is โ but I can tell you exactly what he looks like. Thanks to a fortuitous combination of unwitting tip-offs, I definitively clocked the famously unidentified graffiti maestro at a house party in the West country in June.Banksy was at the party with Steve Lazarides, the charming, extremely driven photographer-turned-gallerist who, for the past three years or so, has exclusively represented Banksyโs work. During that time, prices have climbed steadily.
In October 2005, an edition of prints of Kate Moss in the style of Warholโs Marilyn Monroe was on sale at his rat-infested Westbourne Grove flat for ยฃ1,500. โAt the time we said it was silly money,โ a long-term collector told me last week. โNow they are going through the secondary market for well over ยฃ10,000.โ A forthcoming Bonhamโs sale called Vision 21 includes a study for Banksyโs Blur album cover, Think Tank, that he sprayed on a door in Deptford and which was then cut down, Iโm told, by โtwo pikeysโ. Its estimate of ยฃ5,000 to ยฃ8,000 seems a little low.
Brits are always trying to break America: David Hockney and the Beatles made it but the vast majority of ambitious transatlantic imports are met with, at best, a fleeting vogue and at worst humiliating indifference. See Robbie Williams. I wasnโt convinced that Banksy was going to make it. After all, a few years ago the only place he was a big name was in the niche milieus of Soho ad creatives, Hoxton clubbers and British graffiti artists. But he did it. Last week Banksy cracked the States.
The moment I knew this for sure came on Thursday night, as I stood smoking in an unsalubrious alley between a rag trade sweatshop and Banksyโs venue, a rented warehouse not far from LAโs homeless epicentre, Skid Row.
Just then Brangelina โ Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the worldโs most-wanted-by- the-tabloids couple, made their entrance. It caused less of a stir than you might expect. Granted, the ten-strong hit squad of hardened Los Angeles paparazzi that had followed them here were, despite themselves, a little excited. Immediately after firing off their shots of the megawatt couple leaving their hulking black Range Rover, walking across the alleyway and into the warehouse, one pap, leaning on a dumpster and feverishly scanning his fresh, very valuable pictures, turned to his partner: โF**k me. F**k. I just donโt believe theyโre here.โ
Inside, though, the 150 or so guests kept their cool, registering the coupleโs arrival with involuntary gawps, but then studiously ignoring them. Jude Law, fresh from a guest spot on the Jay Leno show and still โ at least to my eye โ wearing make-up, was already there. And not long after Brangelinaโs arrival, a tousled-haired man wearing a grey T-shirt under a pinstripe suit walked up to Jo Brooks, Banksyโs British PR who was manning the door, and said: โHi. My nameโs Keanu. Is my name on the list?โ
As you would expect at a party attended by such AAA-listers, the crowd inside, which swelled to around 700, was made up of the Los Angeles elite. Musicians, including Meg White, the maniacal drummer from the White Stripes, mingled with music-industry players, television actors, agents, make-up artists, and contributors to painfully hip, small-circulation magazines.
What was completely unexpected, though, was that this giddyingly exclusive in-crowd flocked to see the work of an unnamed bloke from Bristol.
Banksy did not attend (although his girlfriend did) but when he was told of Brangelinaโs presence even he, apparently, was gobsmacked. In only a few days, Banksy has managed to imprint his name on both the lips of Hollywoodโs brightest young things and the papers and screens of Americaโs mass media. Last weekโs show was on the front page of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as on seven US television news shows, including ABCโs Good Morning America and CBS News โ it even made al-Jazeera.
This week Banksyโs art will be in every celebrity magazine and supermarket tabloid, admittedly thanks to the attendance of Brangelina (whose evident closeness, they will breathlessly report, scotched last weekโs rumour that they were close to separation).
On the three days that it was open after Thursdayโs party, the Barely Legal exhibition was visited every day by approximately 10,000 people who queued for up to 500 yards to get in to the 800-capacity warehouse at 2476 Hunter Street.
Banksy professes to be unimpressed by Tinseltownโs sparkle. He told me, in a long-negotiated-for e-mail, that he chose LA for his US solo show because: โHollywood is a town where they honour their heroes by writing their names on the pavement to be walked on by fat people and peed on by dogs. It seemed like a great place to come and be ambitious.โ
However insouciant his posturing, Banksy canโt deny that heโs banked a few bucks. By the time I left LA and the outer circles of Banksyโs caravanserai on Friday afternoon, the vast majority of the showโs approximately 50 works, including canvases, stencils, sculptures, a fridge, two painted trucks, half a red telephone box, some defaced Paris Hilton CDs in a vitrine teeming with cockroaches and a blow-up doll dressed as a gasmasked angel, had been sold. The most expensive piece was a painting that went for about ยฃ150,000.
By lurking, drinking and chatting around the sales office, I gleaned the information that buyers included Christina Aguilera (she bought two), the hip-hop star Everlast (his painting cost $70,000) and Macaulay Culkin. Brangelina inquired after eight works and purchased three paintings, so it is said.
The artistโs new celebrity customers were played down by the artist himself: when I asked if he relished having famous collectors, Banksy replied: โNot as much as if the famous collectors were famous for their collections.โ To propagate Banksyโs mystique, his people are purposefully vague about unromantic topics such as profit.
My estimate is that he made perhaps $3 million from the art and, thanks to a sell-out edition of six prints (each edition ran to 500 and each one cost $500), banked another $1.5 million. Apart from Tai, the elegantly painted elephant, only one work at the show was not for sale: an ornately-framed painting of a Buckingham Palace guardsman, sword on his shoulder, sitting on a pantomime horse.
That work was lent by its owner, and Banksyโs friend, Damien Hirst for the show, which ended on Sunday night. Keanu Reeves, who didnโt buy, seemed nevertheless transfixed โ particularly by Hirstโs loan and a painting of an idyllic, 18th-century bay full of ships and fishermen to which Banksy added flying saucers firing lethal-looking, green death-rays. Reeves said he would โdefinitelyโ hang one in his home and added: โI really enjoyed it very much โ and I learnt something tonight. I liked seeing the earlier works next door and then coming in here and seeing these great, big canvases. Itโs great.โ
Brad Pitt, standing equidistant from his girlfriend and the 38-year-old Tai, whose participation (she was daubed every day in soluble, non-toxic red and silver paint to match the wallpaper in one of the exhibitionโs corners) sparked some censorious press coverage, was equally entranced. โI love it,โ he said. โI think that this guy is really on to something. I first heard about him a year or so ago โ I saw something about him in a magazine.โ
What Pitt particularly loves is that โhe does all thisโ (gesturing around the room) โand he stays anonymous. I think thatโs great. These days everyone is trying to be famous. But he has anonymity.โ
This Pitt said wistfully, with Angelina still a few feet away talking to her assistant and Holly Cushing, the well-connected Englishwoman (she used to work for Sean Penn) who had spent the past three days in a frenzy of mobile phone calls fixing the guestlist.
Despite its studiously rough-and-ready aesthetic, last Thursdayโs party was the climax of an operation almost six months in its planning and preparation. Kari Johnson, Taiโs handler, was first approached โa few months agoโ to see if her entertainment elephant might be available as an exhibit. (Note: I can assure you that Tai is one of the best-loved pachyderms on the planet. She eats carrots constantly. She was not being treated cruelly.)
Then local experts scouted out a suitable venue and Cushing whispered early intelligence of Banksyโs arrival into impeccably connected ears.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, Banksy and his band of assistants were busy stockpiling and creating art for the show. Much of the work was held up in US customs, sparking a gut-wrenching scare. It was far too late to cancel the exhibition; the date was fixed and the stunts, so typical of Banksy, that foretold it had already begun.
First, a few weeks ago, his team distributed 500 defaced copies of the new Paris Hilton CD in 42 music stores around the UK โ a prank that made headlines. Then, the Friday before last, Banksy dressed a blow-up doll in the orange jumpsuit and black hood of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. He deflated it, stuffed it into a backpack and went for a day out at Disneyland. Inside, he sat on a bench and quickly unpacked, inflated his unwanted installation with a pump, and fixed it on some fencing facing a blind corner on the Rocky Mountain Railroad rollercoaster ride. By the time Disneyโs in-house security team spotted Donald and Mickeyโs uninvited new friend, Banksy was long gone, but a cohort remained to record the reaction for the exhibition.
That stunt, like the paintings he put last year on the Palestine side of the West Bank barrier of children digging a hole through the wall (which Brad Pitt told me is his favourite Banksy work), was overtly political. So were some of the works, that were cleared in customs with hours to spare. Not all his images are about world events โ he also loves lampooning advertising โ but they are the ones that tend to attract glowing notices. As Jude Law said of Barely Legal late on Thursday night as we all lounged and boozed around at the after-party by the David Hockney pool of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel: โThe great thing about it is that it was so political. People here need shaking up, they donโt do anything like this here โ itโs fantastic.โ
I would guess that politics is only a Banksy sideline. His favourite artists, he e-mailed me, are The Far Sideโs Gary Larson and Harry Houdini. Houdini, of course, was the conjuror of outrageous illusion, and Larson is a master of the surreal โ both Banksy special subjects.
Last week he stuck to his usual line when explaining his anonymity: โSo I can do my work without being impeded by arrest.โ Then he added: โItโs a pretty safe bet that the reality of me would be a crushing disappointment to a couple of 15-year-old kids out there.โ
Back at that party in June, what I found most telling about observing Banksy was not his appearance (dark hair, lightly bearded, nice trainers โ more I shall not say) but his behaviour. There were dodgems at this rather opulent do, and you couldnโt get Banksy off them. While my girlfriend, son and I waited in the queue we watched as Banksy stayed resolutely in his ride until three five-minute changeovers had passed. Each time they did, he revved up afresh, electrically zooming with as much speed as possible into his fellow drivers. With each juddering impact, he grinned โ and then accelerated away at speed.
They cracked America . . .
Stanley Spencer
The Berkshire-born painter was so esteemed in America that he was awarded an Honorable Mention at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1933.
Henry Moore
Two of the Yorkshiremanโs sculptures were borrowed by MoMA for the โCubism and Abstract Artโ exhibition in 1934. They later became the first major Moores in an American collection.
David Hockney
In 1964, the Bradford-born pop-artist had his first American solo exhibition in New York, exhibiting his California paintings. He received rave reviews.
Damien Hirst
In 2004, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, better known as the shark, became one of the most expensive works sold by a living artist when Saatchi sold it to Steve Cohen, an American collector, for $12 million.
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article644151.ece
from The Times, September 20th 2006, Banksy hits the big time. In just seven days the British graffiti artist conquered LA,made millions and even wowed Brad Pitt I donโt know precisely who Banksy is โ but I can tell you exactly what he looks like. Thanks to a fortuitous combination of unwitting tip-offs, I definitively clocked the famously unidentified graffiti maestro at a house party in the West country in June.Banksy was at the party with Steve Lazarides, the charming, extremely driven photographer-turned-gallerist who, for the past three years or so, has exclusively represented Banksyโs work. During that time, prices have climbed steadily. In October 2005, an edition of prints of Kate Moss in the style of Warholโs Marilyn Monroe was on sale at his rat-infested Westbourne Grove flat for ยฃ1,500. โAt the time we said it was silly money,โ a long-term collector told me last week. โNow they are going through the secondary market for well over ยฃ10,000.โ A forthcoming Bonhamโs sale called Vision 21 includes a study for Banksyโs Blur album cover, Think Tank, that he sprayed on a door in Deptford and which was then cut down, Iโm told, by โtwo pikeysโ. Its estimate of ยฃ5,000 to ยฃ8,000 seems a little low. Brits are always trying to break America: David Hockney and the Beatles made it but the vast majority of ambitious transatlantic imports are met with, at best, a fleeting vogue and at worst humiliating indifference. See Robbie Williams. I wasnโt convinced that Banksy was going to make it. After all, a few years ago the only place he was a big name was in the niche milieus of Soho ad creatives, Hoxton clubbers and British graffiti artists. But he did it. Last week Banksy cracked the States. The moment I knew this for sure came on Thursday night, as I stood smoking in an unsalubrious alley between a rag trade sweatshop and Banksyโs venue, a rented warehouse not far from LAโs homeless epicentre, Skid Row. Just then Brangelina โ Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the worldโs most-wanted-by- the-tabloids couple, made their entrance. It caused less of a stir than you might expect. Granted, the ten-strong hit squad of hardened Los Angeles paparazzi that had followed them here were, despite themselves, a little excited. Immediately after firing off their shots of the megawatt couple leaving their hulking black Range Rover, walking across the alleyway and into the warehouse, one pap, leaning on a dumpster and feverishly scanning his fresh, very valuable pictures, turned to his partner: โF**k me. F**k. I just donโt believe theyโre here.โ Inside, though, the 150 or so guests kept their cool, registering the coupleโs arrival with involuntary gawps, but then studiously ignoring them. Jude Law, fresh from a guest spot on the Jay Leno show and still โ at least to my eye โ wearing make-up, was already there. And not long after Brangelinaโs arrival, a tousled-haired man wearing a grey T-shirt under a pinstripe suit walked up to Jo Brooks, Banksyโs British PR who was manning the door, and said: โHi. My nameโs Keanu. Is my name on the list?โ As you would expect at a party attended by such AAA-listers, the crowd inside, which swelled to around 700, was made up of the Los Angeles elite. Musicians, including Meg White, the maniacal drummer from the White Stripes, mingled with music-industry players, television actors, agents, make-up artists, and contributors to painfully hip, small-circulation magazines. What was completely unexpected, though, was that this giddyingly exclusive in-crowd flocked to see the work of an unnamed bloke from Bristol. Banksy did not attend (although his girlfriend did) but when he was told of Brangelinaโs presence even he, apparently, was gobsmacked. In only a few days, Banksy has managed to imprint his name on both the lips of Hollywoodโs brightest young things and the papers and screens of Americaโs mass media. Last weekโs show was on the front page of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as on seven US television news shows, including ABCโs Good Morning America and CBS News โ it even made al-Jazeera. This week Banksyโs art will be in every celebrity magazine and supermarket tabloid, admittedly thanks to the attendance of Brangelina (whose evident closeness, they will breathlessly report, scotched last weekโs rumour that they were close to separation). On the three days that it was open after Thursdayโs party, the Barely Legal exhibition was visited every day by approximately 10,000 people who queued for up to 500 yards to get in to the 800-capacity warehouse at 2476 Hunter Street. Banksy professes to be unimpressed by Tinseltownโs sparkle. He told me, in a long-negotiated-for e-mail, that he chose LA for his US solo show because: โHollywood is a town where they honour their heroes by writing their names on the pavement to be walked on by fat people and peed on by dogs. It seemed like a great place to come and be ambitious.โ However insouciant his posturing, Banksy canโt deny that heโs banked a few bucks. By the time I left LA and the outer circles of Banksyโs caravanserai on Friday afternoon, the vast majority of the showโs approximately 50 works, including canvases, stencils, sculptures, a fridge, two painted trucks, half a red telephone box, some defaced Paris Hilton CDs in a vitrine teeming with cockroaches and a blow-up doll dressed as a gasmasked angel, had been sold. The most expensive piece was a painting that went for about ยฃ150,000. By lurking, drinking and chatting around the sales office, I gleaned the information that buyers included Christina Aguilera (she bought two), the hip-hop star Everlast (his painting cost $70,000) and Macaulay Culkin. Brangelina inquired after eight works and purchased three paintings, so it is said. The artistโs new celebrity customers were played down by the artist himself: when I asked if he relished having famous collectors, Banksy replied: โNot as much as if the famous collectors were famous for their collections.โ To propagate Banksyโs mystique, his people are purposefully vague about unromantic topics such as profit. My estimate is that he made perhaps $3 million from the art and, thanks to a sell-out edition of six prints (each edition ran to 500 and each one cost $500), banked another $1.5 million. Apart from Tai, the elegantly painted elephant, only one work at the show was not for sale: an ornately-framed painting of a Buckingham Palace guardsman, sword on his shoulder, sitting on a pantomime horse. That work was lent by its owner, and Banksyโs friend, Damien Hirst for the show, which ended on Sunday night. Keanu Reeves, who didnโt buy, seemed nevertheless transfixed โ particularly by Hirstโs loan and a painting of an idyllic, 18th-century bay full of ships and fishermen to which Banksy added flying saucers firing lethal-looking, green death-rays. Reeves said he would โdefinitelyโ hang one in his home and added: โI really enjoyed it very much โ and I learnt something tonight. I liked seeing the earlier works next door and then coming in here and seeing these great, big canvases. Itโs great.โ Brad Pitt, standing equidistant from his girlfriend and the 38-year-old Tai, whose participation (she was daubed every day in soluble, non-toxic red and silver paint to match the wallpaper in one of the exhibitionโs corners) sparked some censorious press coverage, was equally entranced. โI love it,โ he said. โI think that this guy is really on to something. I first heard about him a year or so ago โ I saw something about him in a magazine.โ What Pitt particularly loves is that โhe does all thisโ (gesturing around the room) โand he stays anonymous. I think thatโs great. These days everyone is trying to be famous. But he has anonymity.โ This Pitt said wistfully, with Angelina still a few feet away talking to her assistant and Holly Cushing, the well-connected Englishwoman (she used to work for Sean Penn) who had spent the past three days in a frenzy of mobile phone calls fixing the guestlist. Despite its studiously rough-and-ready aesthetic, last Thursdayโs party was the climax of an operation almost six months in its planning and preparation. Kari Johnson, Taiโs handler, was first approached โa few months agoโ to see if her entertainment elephant might be available as an exhibit. (Note: I can assure you that Tai is one of the best-loved pachyderms on the planet. She eats carrots constantly. She was not being treated cruelly.) Then local experts scouted out a suitable venue and Cushing whispered early intelligence of Banksyโs arrival into impeccably connected ears. Meanwhile, back in the UK, Banksy and his band of assistants were busy stockpiling and creating art for the show. Much of the work was held up in US customs, sparking a gut-wrenching scare. It was far too late to cancel the exhibition; the date was fixed and the stunts, so typical of Banksy, that foretold it had already begun. First, a few weeks ago, his team distributed 500 defaced copies of the new Paris Hilton CD in 42 music stores around the UK โ a prank that made headlines. Then, the Friday before last, Banksy dressed a blow-up doll in the orange jumpsuit and black hood of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. He deflated it, stuffed it into a backpack and went for a day out at Disneyland. Inside, he sat on a bench and quickly unpacked, inflated his unwanted installation with a pump, and fixed it on some fencing facing a blind corner on the Rocky Mountain Railroad rollercoaster ride. By the time Disneyโs in-house security team spotted Donald and Mickeyโs uninvited new friend, Banksy was long gone, but a cohort remained to record the reaction for the exhibition. That stunt, like the paintings he put last year on the Palestine side of the West Bank barrier of children digging a hole through the wall (which Brad Pitt told me is his favourite Banksy work), was overtly political. So were some of the works, that were cleared in customs with hours to spare. Not all his images are about world events โ he also loves lampooning advertising โ but they are the ones that tend to attract glowing notices. As Jude Law said of Barely Legal late on Thursday night as we all lounged and boozed around at the after-party by the David Hockney pool of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel: โThe great thing about it is that it was so political. People here need shaking up, they donโt do anything like this here โ itโs fantastic.โ I would guess that politics is only a Banksy sideline. His favourite artists, he e-mailed me, are The Far Sideโs Gary Larson and Harry Houdini. Houdini, of course, was the conjuror of outrageous illusion, and Larson is a master of the surreal โ both Banksy special subjects. Last week he stuck to his usual line when explaining his anonymity: โSo I can do my work without being impeded by arrest.โ Then he added: โItโs a pretty safe bet that the reality of me would be a crushing disappointment to a couple of 15-year-old kids out there.โ Back at that party in June, what I found most telling about observing Banksy was not his appearance (dark hair, lightly bearded, nice trainers โ more I shall not say) but his behaviour. There were dodgems at this rather opulent do, and you couldnโt get Banksy off them. While my girlfriend, son and I waited in the queue we watched as Banksy stayed resolutely in his ride until three five-minute changeovers had passed. Each time they did, he revved up afresh, electrically zooming with as much speed as possible into his fellow drivers. With each juddering impact, he grinned โ and then accelerated away at speed. They cracked America . . . Stanley Spencer The Berkshire-born painter was so esteemed in America that he was awarded an Honorable Mention at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1933. Henry Moore Two of the Yorkshiremanโs sculptures were borrowed by MoMA for the โCubism and Abstract Artโ exhibition in 1934. They later became the first major Moores in an American collection. David Hockney In 1964, the Bradford-born pop-artist had his first American solo exhibition in New York, exhibiting his California paintings. He received rave reviews. Damien Hirst In 2004, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, better known as the shark, became one of the most expensive works sold by a living artist when Saatchi sold it to Steve Cohen, an American collector, for $12 million. entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article644151.ece |
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