5.2 Contemporary Art
KEHINDE WILEY
Image 5.10 Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005, oil on canvas, 274.3 x 274.3 cm (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York) © Kehinde Wiley
Confronting art history
In this large painting, Kehinde Wiley, an African-American artist, strategically re-creates a famous French painting from two hundred years before but with key differences. This act of appropriation reveals issues about the tradition of portraiture and all that it implies about power and privilege. Wiley asks us to think about the biases of the art historical canon (the set of works that are regarded as “masterpieces”), representation in pop culture, and issues of race and gender. Here, Wiley replaces the original white subject—the French general-turned-emperor Napoleon Bonaparte—with an anonymous Black man whom Wiley approached on the street as part of his “street-casting process.” Although Wiley does occasionally create paintings on commission, he typically asks everyday people of color to sit for photographs, which he then transforms into paintings. Along the way, he talks with those sitters, gathering their thoughts about what they should wear, how they might pose, and which historical paintings to reference.
Image 5.11 Left: Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps or Bonaparte at the St Bernard Pass, 1801 version, oil on canvas, 275 x 232 cm (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere); right: Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005, oil on canvas, 274.3 x 274.3 cm (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York) © Kehinde Wiley
Napoleon Leading the Army is a clear spin-off of Jacques-Louis David’s painting of 1801, which was commissioned by Charles IV, the King of Spain, to commemorate Napoleon’s victorious military campaign against the Austrians. The original portrait smacks of propaganda. Napoleon, in fact, did not pose for the original painting nor did he lead his troops over the mountains into Austria. He sent his soldiers ahead on foot and followed a few days later, riding on a mule.
Image 5.12 Left: Detail of David’s signature on the horse’s breastplate, Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps or Bonaparte at the St Bernard Pass, 1800–01 version, oil on canvas, 261 x 221 cm (Chateau de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison); right: Detail of Wiley’s signature on the horse’s breastplate, Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005, oil on canvas, 274.3 x 274.3 cm (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York) © Kehinde WileyImage 5.13 Detail of central figure, Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005, oil on canvas, 274.3 x 274.3 cm (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York) © Kehinde Wiley
Choosing symbolic details
Wiley calls attention to ideas about authority and historical representation, keeping many original elements and making significant alterations. The royal blue coat of the original makes an appearance (peeking out from the young man’s camouflage shirt), as does the gold-encased sword (held in place by a red strap). But Wiley’s subject wears an outfit that is completely contemporary and reflective of a culture notorious for flashy imagery and larger than life figures: hip hop culture. This young man wears camouflage fatigues, Timberland work boots, and a bandana—conjuring up militaristic associations with the original painting and with the violence of contemporary urban America, particularly as experienced by young Black men. The subject of Wiley’s painting reveals his tattoos and wears red wristbands from the Starter sportswear company, details that add to the sense that this is a real individual living in the early 21st century.
Instead of the naturalistic setting of David’s painting, Wiley has inserted a decorative, unrealistic backdrop reminiscent of luxurious French fabric. This background, along with the high-keyed colors, and ornate frame (complete with faux family shields and the artist’s self-portrait at the top) call attention to the artificiality and pompousness of image-making.
Through his demonstration of extraordinary painting skill and his use of famous portraits, Wiley could be seen as wryly placing himself in line with the history of great master painters. Here, for example, he has signed and dated the painting just as David did, painting his name and the date in Roman numerals onto the band around the horse’s chest. Wiley makes another reference to lineage in the foreground where he retains the original painting’s rocky surface and the carved names of illustrious leaders who led troops over the Alps: NAPOLEON, HANNIBAL, and KAROLUS MAGNUS (Charlemagne). But Wiley also includes the name WILLIAMS—another insistence on including ordinary people of color who are often left out of systems of representation and glorification. Not only is Williams a common African-American surname, it hints at the imposition of Anglo names on Black people who were brought by force from Africa and stripped of their own histories.
Image 5.14 Left: Detail of inscription reading “Bonaparte,” Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps or Bonaparte at the St Bernard Pass, 1800–01 version, oil on canvas, 261 x 221 cm (Chateau de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison); right: Detail of inscription reading “Williams” and Bonaparte,” Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005, oil on canvas, 274.3 x 274.3 cm (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York) © Kehinde Wiley
About the artist
Kehinde Wiley attracted media and art world attention almost immediately after earning his MFA from Yale University in 2001. He was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem and has been included in many significant group and solo exhibitions. Wiley now employs studio assistants who participate in his “street-casting” process and in the various stages of painting and sculpture fabrication. In addition to large-scale paintings, Wiley has created stained glass, painted altarpieces, and cast bronze sculptures, all of which examine of art history, race, gender, and the power of representation.
JEFF KOONS
Image 5.15 Balloon Dog (Yellow) _ Jeff Koons 1994-2000 stainless steel … _ Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.
Banality
Image 5.16 Jeff Koons, Pink Panther, 1988, glazed porcelain, 104.1 x 52 x 48.2 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) © Jeff Koons
Imagine walking into an art gallery and seeing overgrown toys, or cartoon characters presented as sculpture. If, in 1988, you had wandered into the Sonnabend Gallery on West Broadway in New York City, this is indeed what you would have witnessed: it was an exhibition entitled “Banality” by New York artist Jeff Koons presenting some twenty sculptures in porcelain and polychromed wood. The work certainly strikes as an affront to taste: the sculptures are highly polished and gleaming. The colors—muted pale blue, pink, lavender, green, and yellowish gold—seem to belong to the 1950s and 60s. The glossy textures look garish and factory-made, surfaces one associates with inexpensive commercial art. One would almost want to call these sculptures “figurines” were it not for their size. To add to this catalogue of horrors, the artist had farmed out the actual production to German and Italian artisans who made each work in triplicate! “Banality” thus debuted simultaneously in New York, Chicago, and Cologne.
A glazed porcelain statue entitled Pink Panther belongs to that body of work. It depicts a smiling, bare-breasted, blonde woman scantily clad in a mint-green dress, head tilted back and to the left as if addressing a crowd of onlookers. The figure is based on the 1960s B-list Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield—here she clutches a limp pink panther in her left hand, while her right hand covers an exposed breast. From behind one sees that the pink panther has its head thrown over her shoulder and wears an expression of hapless weariness. It too is a product of Hollywood fantasy—the movie of the same name debuted the cartoon character in 1963. The colors are almost antiquated; do they harken back to the popular culture of a pre-civil rights era as a politically regressive statement of nostalgia? And what about the female figure—posed in a state of deshabille (carelessly and partially undressed)? At a time of increased feminist presence in the still male-dominated art world this could only be perceived as a rearguard move. Or was Koons—a postmodern provocateur like no other—simply parodying male authority as he had done in some of his other work?
Image 5.17 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, 1977, gelatin silver print, 24.1 x 19.2 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) © Cindy Sherman
Postmodernism: the artist as critic of mass culture
Provocation is a mainstay of the modernist avant-gardes reaching at least as back as far as when Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain of 1917, an ordinary urinal, was proposed as an artwork. But whereas Duchamp eventually accrued near-mythical status, that same critical reception for Koons was not forthcoming—in fact, he would become one of the first artists of this period to achieve a level of success that depended more on the art market than on art criticism. He is still reviled. In 2014 a review described Koons as “Duchamp with lots of ostentatious trimmings.” [1] It’s easy to see why he has continued to provoke: the postmodern 1980s inaugurated the contemporary sense of the artist as a critical and serious interrogator of mass culture and mass media. Cindy Sherman, one of the most prominent artists of that period, made photographs of herself that paraded the clichés of femininity before an audience that consumed critical theory about the constructed nature of reality and the oppressive manipulations of mass media. Her work was understood as a deconstruction (shorthand for the examination and analysis of the elements) of gender stereotypes. Another prominent postmodern artist of the period, Krzysztof Wodiczko, used high-powered projectors to cast politically charged imagery onto corporate façades after dark—imagery that often pointed to economic and social contradictions and prompted public discourse within an ephemeral and often provocative, public space.
Artists—postmodern artists—were supposed to counter the banality of evil that lurked behind public and popular culture, not giddily revel in it as Koons seemed to do. There appeared to be nothing serious about any of the works in the “Banality” exhibition: a life-sized bust of pop icon Michael Jackson and his pet monkey Bubbles; a ribbon-necked pig—especially egregious—in polychromed wood escorted by cherubic youths, two of which are winged. And of course Pink Panther, a work that seemed destined to insult rather than inform. It all seemed like kitsch posing as high art.
Image 5.18 Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, ceramic, glaze and paint, 106.7 x 179.1 x 82.6 cm (The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles) © Jeff Koons
Kitsch
What is kitsch? The American art critic Clement Greenberg once defined it as the opposite of what a truly progressive, avant-garde modernism embodied. Greenberg advocated for a modern art that was true to its materials, such as the gestural abstractions of New York School artists like Jackson Pollock, who splattered and spilled paint in abstract fashion on unprimed canvas—declaring a direct creative confrontation that was raw and honest. Kitsch, a word of German origin, refers to mass-produced imagery designed to please the broadest possible audience with objects of questionable taste (think of objects and images with popular, sentimental subject matter and style). Postmodern art attacked Greenberg’s influential theory of modern art, creating images in direct opposition to modernism. While modernism championed painting, form, and originality, postmodernism foregrounded photography, subject matter, and reproduction, and responded to modernism’s search for the profound by presenting the quotidian and banal aspects of experience. Postmodernism grounded the rarified atmosphere of genius that was prevalent in modernism in the politics of everyday life.
Image 5.19 Jeff Koons, Ushering in Banality, 1988, wood and paint, 80.1 x 194.1 x 100 cm (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; photo: Amaury Laporte, CC BY 2.0) © Jeff Koons
Image 5.20 “A Little Boo Boo,” Hummel figurine, porcelain
But postmodernism stopped short of fully embracing kitsch by insisting on a degree of self-aware critical distance. This is where Koons found a fault line that he fully exploited with works like Pink Panther. Hummel figurines and other popular collector’s items are the basis for the art in “Banality.” Koons rendered these saccharine and sentimental little figural groupings—cartoonish emblems of childhood innocence—at a life-size scale as an assault upon sincerity but also as an assault upon taste, and it is here that even the most daring of postmodern advocates drew a line in the sand. Like the modernist distinction between art and an everyday object drawn by Greenberg, Pink Panther challenged the distinction between an ironic appropriation of a mass-culture object and the object itself (seemingly without critical distance) thereby challenging the whole critical enterprise of postmodernism itself.
BANKSKY
Image 5.21 "File:974 Museu Banksy, c. Trafalgar 34 (Barcelona) (cropped).jpg." Wikimedia Commons. 1 May 2026, 04:06 UTC. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:974_Museu_Banksy,_c._Trafalgar_34_(Barcelona)_(cropped).jpg&oldid=1206369061> 9 May 2026, 21:37. CC BY 4.0.
Street Art – The Rise of Banksy
This chapter deals with the recent London art scene after 2000, with a clear focus on Street Art, with its most prominent representative Banksy, who at least quantitatively took over the art headlines of British newspapers and the position of the successor of the art enfant terrible of the Naughties, Damien Hirst:
The most controversial and popular young British artist of the century so far did not go to Goldsmiths or indeed any other art college, is not supported by Charles Saatchi despite the collector’s reported avid interest and has never had bis work deconstructed in polysyllabics by Brian Sewell. His canvasses are bought for tens of thousands of pounds by the most illustrious rock stars of our age but the majority of his art is public, produced with no assistance from – indeed often the tacit disapproval of – the local authorities. Beale, a journalist, who wrote these lurid lines in a lifestyle magazine in 2004, interviewed Banksy who stated that he thinks the YBAs to be »quite amusing« Clarke mentions Banksy’s interest especially in Damien Hirst.
What began, in retrospect, with Hirst’s Freeze exhibition is after 2000 typical of the London art scene. This art world focuses on social events such as exhibitions and private viewings, or their after-party at a club or pub. Student and more off space exhibitions often consist solely of private openings and such exhibitions are not primarily attended by collectors and gallery owners, but rather by the Künstlerbohème. In the 1990s, after the ‘private view’ under Hirst’s leadership, Groucho Club in Soho and pubs in Hoxton in the East End in particular were very busy, until about 2002 when Hirst gave up alcohol and drugs. In particular, a variety of smaller and larger galleries that showed contemporary artists opened in Hoxton and Shoreditch. In 2000, Jopling’s White Cube Gallery, which represented many famous YBAs at the Hoxton Square, moved there as well. Since the 1990s, artistic gentrification by creative people of all kinds led to the growth of the prestige and attractiveness of the night life and a consequent rise in rent prices both in the East End and in the Docklands. That is why the next generation of artists continued to move outside, to the north and east, Hackney, Dalston and Brixton for instance, where the game began all over again.
Not long before the new millennium, a mid-1970s Bristol-born, former Graffiti style writer, who signed his illegal works with the pseudonym Banksy moved to London. In the appendix of this analysis, one can find his short biography, in which the known sources about his career were combined for the first time. In his hometown, Banksy was known since about 1994 through his illegal spray painting, which he circulated since 2000 in London and then internationally. Banksy started working in the aforementioned gentrified neighborhoods Hoxton and Shoreditch, where he soon made his name known. There, he organized (often illegal) exhibitions and traveled to other cities, where he participated in group exhibitions and presented his work in big urban metropolises, including Hamburg, Paris, Berlin, Melbourne, New York and Los Angeles.
In 2000, Banksy met Damien Hirst in London, and was soon promoted by him. “Damien Hirst has given […] [Banksy] an endorsement, and he’s been flown out to New York to paint Hotel rooms and to the Costa del Sol to jazz up a lap-dancing complex.”
This quote suggests that, at that time, the already established and successful Hirst gave the emerging Street Artist Banksy a recommendation, probably because he valued his work: “[Banksy] received a trail of commendations. ‘Fucking fair play’ was the response of Damien Hirst […]” wrote the Bristol venue as early as February 2000. The young ‘underground’ artist Banksy meets the ten years older, art market guru Damien Hirst. The latter rented out a studio to Banksy in the East End. As in the chapter entitled “Keep It Spotless (Defaced Hirst)” describes in more detail, both artists created at least three works together in 2007 and 2012.
Image 5.22 "File:Banksy statue 2026 - Waterloo Place, St James, London.jpg." Wikimedia Commons. 3 Jun 2026, 15:23 UTC. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Banksy_statue_2026_-_Waterloo_Place,_St_James,_London.jpg&oldid=1225277989> 11 Aug 2026, 15:15. CC0.
However, there were (and maybe still are) certainly points of friction between Banksy and Hirst. In an interview in 2003, Banksy responded to the question of whether he wanted to be part of the art establishment: “I don’t know. I wouldn’t sell shit to Charles Saatchi. If I sell 55,000 books and how ever many screen prints, I don’t need one man to tell me I’m an artist. It’s hugely different if people buy it, rather than one fucking Tory punter does. No, I’d never knowingly sell anything to him.” This quote is a critique of the art market, but also indirectly of Hirst, who is, in the public perception, Saatchi’s most prominent “discovery.” Even in 2015, Banksy sees Hirst at best in a critical light: “I didn’t want to include Damien Hirst, the show doesn’t need his validation or any of the baggage that might come with his name. But when you’re organizing an art show at the seaside and you know there’s a sculpture of a beachball hovering on a jet of air above fifty sharpened steak knives – well, you have to include it. That piece is so poetic and technically intriguing. This show is packed with a lot of exciting new artists it would be profoundly depressing if the standout artist was Damien Hirst. But you can’t argue with the piece. It’s bigger than what you think of him, or what you think of the art world, or even what he thinks of himself. It’s a perfectly realized piece of work.”
It is not known how Hirst and Banksy first met. Both, however, had con tact with known members of the British music scene. Banksy was friends with fellow Bristol-born trip-hop greats such as Massive Attack and Portishead and Hirst with Britpop band members of Blur and Pulp, with whom he studied. In 1995 Hirst directed a Blur music video. He also had a top ten hit in the UK charts with Blur’s bassist Alex James as pop band Fat Les 1998. The cover of Blur’s last studio album “Think Tank” (2003) was designed by Banksy. Both Hirst and Banksy, however, had worked earlier as designers of record covers: Hirst, already famous as an artist, in 1994 for well-known musician Dave Stewart, who also wrote a song about him. Around 1999 Banksy, still unknown, worked for the record label “Wall of Sound”, for which he designed about ten record covers, and prior to that, for Hombre Records, Bristol. Record covers are advertising and packaging for the consumer product music. Hirst’s art, like Banksy’s, is very much influenced by advertising and popular culture, or in fact interwoven with it. As a student, Hirst was inspired by a publication that reprinted advertising graphics such as posters or magazine advertising. Banksy designed advertising flyers, like many Street Artists who worked in the creative business in (not only) London around 2000, “The largest group of street-art subculture consists of young adults [...] who meanwhile study Communication Design, Graphic Design, Illustration or similar (or have already finished) and now placard or spray paint paste-ups, logos, letter ing or characters in the streets.”
Ad-men and Street Artists are often the same people, who at least complete a similar training and place their works on the same walls and surfaces in public spaces. They are competitors who influence each other, not only with respect to the most visible ways, but also content, visual style, and media used. Banksy again and again alters slogans or phrases that are known in advertising, as “Terms and conditions apply” or “Now 10% more CRAP.”
Banksy’s “Turf War” exhibition in 2003 was also seen by Hirst, who, prob ably in the same year bought his first work by Banksy, which he showed in 2006 with two other Banksys in “In The Darkest Hour There May Be Light” The year before, he bought the largest part of Banksy’s exhibition »Crude Oils« as well. The fact that a globally successful and established artist and Turner Prize winner shows the illegal street-art artist Banksy in an exhibition along side greats such as Bacon, Koons and Warhol, can be understood as a positive recognition of Street Art by established Gallery art, although it also gave Hirst a platform to present himself as a visionary philanthropist in the role of an art collector and patron like Saatchi. The recognition process of Street Art was continued in 2008 with the Cans Festival, organized by Banksy and Tristan Manco, with 40 of the best known Street Artists painting walls under Waterloo Station, and the modern Street Art exhibition at the Tate, the first of its kind on such a large scale a few weeks later. Three of the six Street Artists who were allowed to create monumental temporary works in the context of this exhibition on the outer walls of the Tate Modern, are/were represented by the Lazarides Gallery: Blu, Faile, JR, all successfully exhibited before in commercial art galleries. Lazarides was a long time friend, photographer, and (from 2001 until late 2008) agent of Banksy. After Banksy’s very successful solo exhibition in Bristol in 2009, which surprised a provincial museum with a stream of more than 300,000 visitors (the largest YBA exhibition at the renowned London’s Royal Academy did not have many more in 1997, which at that time represented an absolute record) and after his Oscar-nominated Street Art Documentary in 2010, the great American art museums finally decided to honor Street Art with a big group show. “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles opened its doors in April of 2011 and could also be seen in 2012 at the prestigious Brooklyn Museum in New York. One room was designed by Banksy.
For Street Art’s recognition within the art market, not only was aesthetic-critical analysis and presentation by the art establishment necessary, but also, to a large extent, its’ financial success. “When a thing is current it creates currency,” wrote McLuhan. Especially since Banksy’s “Barely Legal” show in 2006, the international press talks about record sales of Banksy canvases, both on eBay, where his illegal templates “stolen” off the road were auctioned, and by major auction houses such as Bonhams or Sotheby’s. The record sales of sometimes several hundred thousand pounds sterling for Banksy’s works ironically raised the reputation of Street Art, which is often critical of consumer culture and the establishment. Those Banksy art works at auction are usually works from the secondary market that he sold cheap ten years before – a fact that is usually overlooked. For Banksy, the great financial success of »Barely Legal« and the concomitant explosion of media attention, which led to increasing hostility and accusations from members of the Style Writing Graffiti and Street Art subculture, had a strong effect. The otherwise tirelessly producing Banksy took an exhibition break of almost 20 months and obviously had an existential crisis. The majority of the British press, such as the art critic JJ Charlesworth, criticized Banksy and other Street Artists for their financial success: “More often than not [Banksy’s Street Art, note UB] is discussed by journalists in relation to sales prizes, the underlying implication being that it’s some kind of elaborate rip-off.”
This point of criticism connects Banksy and other successful Street Artists to Hirst or with abstract or conceptual art in general, of which similar allegations are often made.
Image 5.23 Banksy, IKEA Punk (stencil), London 2009. Source: Photo of hobedehoy (21 September 2009) http://www.flickr.com/photos/21901802@ N07/3940977651 / (Sighted: March 2011) CC0.
Banksy’s Pseudonym
The name ‘Banksy’ is a pseudonym for an anonymous British Style Writing Graffiti and Street Art artist, about whom little has been officially confirmed. At the time of publication of this work, it can be said with certainty that he comes from the south-western English port city of Bristol and was born around 1974.
The term alias or pseudonym can, historically, be associated with the kind of political censorship or social ostracism that forced the artist to use an alternate identity that is not his or her real name. The use of a pseudonym Ulrich Blanché: Banksy.
Urban Art in a Material World
Western industrialized nation is less common today than a few decades ago, when most actors and writers in the public eye used pseudonyms. For Banksy this historical approach also plays a role as it is meant as a protest against celebrity culture and belief in brands. Another reason for selecting a custom name lies in Banksy’s activity as a Street Artist and (former) style writer. For Style Writing Graffiti evolutionary and virtually everything centers on the sprayer’s name. First and foremost, a pseudonym is meant to conceal the true identity of the sprayer or writer as a protection from prosecution. At the same time, the alias should be practical and easy to write quickly with a spray can. It should be short enough to write in a timely manner and reduce the probability of getting caught. At the same time, some letter combinations are better suited to quick application than others and/or look more harmonious on a wall than others. Sprayer names are rarely more than five or six letters (so ‘Banksy’ is quite long). Moreover, alias names and conventional historical pseudonyms are often reminiscent of the ‘real name’ of the sprayer/artist, using initials or a shortened form. An alias should be short, concise, and creative.
Banksy’s real name is likely Robin Gunningham, a name that makes sense in light of the following evidence: From what is known so far, the first name Robin appeared most frequently in sources about Banksy and he edited all his books as Robin Banksy. He is listed as “Robin Banks (Banksy)” in a book called “Dirty Graphics and Strange Characters” in 1999. In an early interview in the year 2000, he is addressed as ‘Robin’ and presented as ‘Robin Banks.’ The same name also appeared as ‘Robin Banx’ in an early collaboration work. In 2006, rather than feature one of the best known superheroes (Batman, Superman, Spiderman), he chose Robin, Batman’s assistant as the central character in a later work. In the mid-1990s, according to Clarke, Banksy thought about changing his name to ‘Robin Banks.’ Clarke also always calls him Robin in his book about Banksy’s early years in New York.
Before Banksy the Street Artist, Great Britain knew other “Banksys,” the most famous is a football player called Gordon Banks, who issued his autobiography “Banksy” in 2002, shortly before Banksy the Street Artist became famous. Both Banksys have popular nicknames that reiterate their closeness to “the common people” in what they did or do. On the subject of football – Robin Banksy called himself a Bristol City fan, a local football club in his native city also known as “The Robins” because the players wear red shirts at home and had a robin (bird) in their club’s badge from 1976 to 1994, Banksy’s formative years. So “Robin” seems to be a local patriotic nickname. “Robin” Gunningham is a redhead as far as a school photo from 1989 tells. Banksy the Street Artist prefers to use signal color red in addition to his black and white stencils.
In 2001 he told Juice Magazine, “Banksy” is a nickname he got because of his last name. Gunningham includes the word ‘gun,” the sound of which can be found onomatopoeically in Banks(y): “Banksy” most likely evolved from the comic word ‘bang’ for a shot, which sounds dynamic and active, especially if he writes it in combination with an exclamation mark, as he often did in his early years – ‘Banksy!’ His early self-portrait (like the Guerrilla Girls with a monkey mask) pictures him with two guns or spray cans, which he is pointing at the viewer. In 1998 Banksy signed a greeting card with ‘Mr. Banks’ with the ‘Banksy’ tag underneath his signature. Wright quotes a photographer from Bristol, Matthew Smith, indicating that in 1995 Banksy did not call himself ‘Banksy.’ A further early work features a different, identical-sounding variation, namely “Bankz.”A joint effort with his former spray crew DBZ in 1999, namely a draft dated 1998, that was never executed, is signed by the sprayers Inkie and Nach and ‘Banks.’. Obviously, at that time he was trying out different variations. The ‘Banksy’ tag also appeared in a previous stenciled version and also in freehand collaboration pieces (but often written by others), before he settled on the final stenciled ‘Banksy’ version at the latest in 1996, which he used exclusively but only since about 1999.
‘Banksy’ combined with the name ‘Robin’ forms an anarchist, anti-capitalist, and witty message: ‘Robin Banksy’ sounds like ‘robbin’ banks,’, which Banksy executed in said early as a text as image (bank robbing kids). In this way, ‘Banksy’ is an abbreviation of a phraseonym, a “pseudonym formed from a part of a sentence,” according to Eymer (among others), as it was used for instance by the well-known British DJ Rob da Bank (born Robert John Gorham). A friend of Banksy’s, London Street Artist Sweet Toof, also draws attention to the similarities between Graffiti and bank robbers.
BBC News quoted a journalist who is not sure, but thinks that Banksy’s real name is Rob Banks. The Bristolian Wright notes that (but not how) this was wrong, without providing a correct version. In 2001 in Flux Magazine Banksy replied that his pseudonym ‘Banksy’ was derived of ‘Robin Banks’, a friend once attached the ‘y’. At the same time he mentioned the said acoustic pun ‘robbing banks’ and stated that this is a pseudonym.558 In February of 2000 he answered the question of whether his name was really Robin Banks in a similarly unclear and ironic way: “Why should I lie about that?”
Another Robin might be inspirational for Robin Banksy as well, the one he keeps borrowing his hoodie style from, which Banksy wore and wears in most authorized photos or videos: the anti-capitalist Robin Hood. In 2014 Banksy answers the FAQ “What’s the deal with Sotheby’s?” on his website with “As a kid I always dreamed of growing up to be a character in Robin Hood. I never realised I’d end up playing one of the gold coins.” In summary, ‘Banksy’ seems to be a short form of his ‘long-alias’ ‘Robin Banks’.
However, Banksy has also used other names, according to Hattenstone’s interview from 2003: “He says he has been arrested for Graffiti in the past, but not in recent years, and never as Banksy.” In January, 2002 he impersonated himself in Squall Magazine even as a Graffiti art collective, Dept. of Public Works, as well as its’ members ‘Kid B’ and ‘Spoon Fed’ (both Banksy).
Although Banksy always had assistants, to keep cave and to work faster, there are no hints Banksy is a collective. In the early 2000s former Graffiti Style Writer turned Street Artist Ben Eine assisted Banksy. Although his (alleged) “real name” has repeatedly appeared in the media since 2008, Robin Gunningham (who has been underground for years) firmly clings to his pseudonym ‘Banksy’. In the beginning his aim was to stay anonymous to escape criminal prosecution. Now it is much more that it is his trademark, as he says when asked why he now (2010) remains anonymous, “Charlie Chaplin used to say, ‘Once I talk, I’m like any other comic.’ I figure I’d follow this lead. I walk like him anyway.” On the other hand, anonymity is a political statement which is consistent with his art influenced by activism: his conscious decision to be anonymous despite of the publicity of his art and his alias can be seen as a critical commentary on western society: The fictional character ‘Banksy’ reflects the increasing influence of advertising, marketing, and self-promotion on artists such as Damien Hirst, starting in the late 1980s, with which Banksy can both cope with and use, while also strongly criticizing and rejecting this influence. Banksy uses strategies from PR, marketing, and advertising successfully and subversively. While he pretends that his primary goal is not to make a lot of money but rather to increase knowledge of his name and anonymity, he uses marketing as a sort of anti-marketing in order to question these strategies through paradox.
Banksy turns Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” on its head: “In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes.” So his (non-) biography is possibly one of his most important and best-known works, including but not only in terms of consumption. Modern viewers of art take for granted the ready availability of trusted biographical data, at least basic information, about an artist. Whether they are right or wrong does not necessarily matter. But if an artist like Banksy refuses to make this information available, interest in his person grows.
Banksy’s (not entirely successful) denial of any autobiographical interpretation allows him to question this expectation and also give his work an aura of authenticity on par with the interest in talented artists who died at a young age, for instance. Because viewers lack biographical details like a ‘difficult childhood’ or the like, they are completely dependent on self-reflection in statements about Banksy’s works because they cannot refer to a supposedly objective artistic biography, but must rather rely solely on their own views. The artistic persona ‘Banksy’ is an anti-celebrity. On the one hand he serves the prevailing cult of celebrity by ‘feeding’ the media with specific information/ images, but at the same time he questions this cult as a supposedly anonymous anti-star and vehemently criticizing it. Anonymity (with simultaneous omni presence of his artworks and actions) is Banksy’s trademark, its own distinctive feature has a high recognition effect. It presents anonymity not as something regrettable, but as a higher goal. In times of the growth of this cult of celebrity, he created a caricature and yet also served it. Banksy also shows that authenticity and celebrity are difficult to combine and that as concepts, both must be challenged in general. Banksy’s will to remain anonymous in order to protect his person from the consequences of his illegal activities is not reason enough because the real identities of other equally well-known Street Artists like Blek, the collective Faile, or Obey have long been public knowledge without the consequence of spending years in prison. His lawyer claims that Banksy even increased the financial value of the walls on which he sprayed.
Better-known precursors from art history are the “Zurich sprayer” Harald Naegli or the feminist and anti-racist Guerrilla Girls of the 1980s. Like Banksy, Naegli oscillated between art and Graffiti and remained anonymous for political reasons, but was eventually caught. Like the Guerrilla Girls, Banksy often wears a gorilla mask. The following quote could just as well have come from Banksy: “We wear gorilla masks to focus on the issues rather than our personalities. [...] The mystery surrounding our identities has attracted attention. We could be anyone, we are everywhere.”