Why the real Banksy need not stand up

They won’t leave Banksy alone. A group of scientists from Queen Mary University say they have “unmasked” the street artist who kept his identity a secret even as he became a maverick celebrity. It is as the Daily Mail has suspected since 2008. The man using the pseudonym, Banksy, is really Robert Gunningham from Bristol, the scientists say. All the energy of a terror investigation was deployed to prove that the artist who lives in the shadows is a middle class, middle-aged man who has a house in the suburbs and went to public school.

The project, titled “Tagging Banksy”, produced a “geoprofile” that traced a pattern between places where his artwork is frequently located and addresses linked to Gunningham. Geoprofiles have been used to track serial killers, malaria outbreaks and minor acts of terror. A criminologist and former detective was part of the research team, which compares Banksy’s work to criminal vandalism. They are slightly milder than the Daily Mail, which claimed to have found the true identity of the “art terrorist” nearly a decade ago.

Banksy the Ripper

By now, Banksy has become the Jack the Ripper of the art world. Only consider the similarities. The Ripper stalked the streets of Victorian London, carving up Unfortunates and taunting the police with clues that would not be decoded. In the 127 years since the Ripper’s last known kill, the secret of his identity has been the subject of fevered investigation. Over the decades, it has been conclusively proved that Jack was really Prince Albert, half-crazed by syphilis; the queen’s physician, who moonlighted as a Freemason; and Walter Sickert, the artist who painted his murders into his canvas.

Banksy stalks the world’s cities with his spray paint and stencils. His artwork has the suddenness of a crime scene, assaulting walls, pavements and the passing viewer. He uses stencils so he can paint at a furious speed and get away before he is caught. They cut sharp lines on the surface and etch the subject in noirish shadows. His work has a kind of frenzied, demotic appeal that the art establishment took a while to warm up to.

In 2003, he took a portrait of a woman, painted a gas mask on her and secretly stuck the picture on a wall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “I think it’s fair to say,” sniffed Elyse Topalian, spokeswoman for the Met, “it would take more than a piece of Scotch tape to get a work of art into the Met.” Since then, the establishment has discovered street art, and Banksy’s work is now auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It would seem that Banksy rather likes his work to smell of something criminal. Early in his career, he was signing off as “Robert Banx”, suggesting the idea of street art as bank robbery, and his first exhibition in Los Angeles was titled “Barely Legal”. In 2010, Banksy directed Exit from the Giftshop, an alleged documentary. Except it’s seems to be less documentary and more elaborate con job. Banksy appears on screen in the best serial killer fashion, face shadowed in a dark hoodie, voice distorted to a metallic baritone reminiscent of Bane, the Batman villain.

The crime of art

The criminality is political. Banksy takes the radical potential of street art and turns it into a weapon of disruption, challenging governments and overturning notions of market value.

This is the artist who painted dreaming children on the concrete walls of the West Bank and a protester lobbing a bouquet of flowers instead of a Molotov cocktail in the city of Beit Sahur. In the refugee camp at Calais, he painted murals depicting Steve Jobs as an immigrant from Syria and a child looking at Britain through a telescope which has a vulture perched on top. While his work sells for a fortune and he has sometimes been called a “Champagne Socialist”, Banksy also puts up high resolution images of his painting that are free to download. Jack the Ripper meets Robin Hood, if you will.

The practices of conservation and curation that grow around other works of art, the fussy reverence for creative genius, are almost entirely absent with Banksy’s oeuvre. His work is constantly being wiped out, painted over, demolished or waiting to be discovered in some furtive street corner, and genius can go stuff it. Even his fame, acquired in anonymity, is a sort of anti-fame, a shadow of celebrity rather than celebrity itself. It is the shadow that is named Banksy.

The shadow

Now this scourge of the art world is in danger of becoming an actual person. Back in 2008, when the Daily Mail had outed Banksy as Gunningham, the real scandal had seemed to be that the street artist was middle class, and not “a council estate hoodie with a knife”. The Guardian had then written an angry defence of Banksy, saying street art needed to be liberated from its cliches. But then it concluded, “The question isn’t who is Banksy. The question is who cares?”

It’s a fair point, but the question may be a bit more urgent than that. Jack the Ripper never had to put up with geoprofiles during his lifetime, or with the Daily Mail, for that matter. If Jack were proved to be, say, Prince Albert, he wouldn’t be Jack anymore, he would be Albert. Would Banksy still be Banksy if he were conclusively proved to be Gunningham?