BANKSY: Off the wall

Is Banksy's work art, or is it graffiti? To be honest, it does’t matter what you think. You’ll just have to put up with it because no one knows what Banksy, the so-called “guerrilla artist”, looks like.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. Presumably Banksy’s girlfriend knows what he looks like, as do his parents, though it’s rumoured that they have no clue that he is a global superstar and think he’s a jobbing painter and decorator. A Times journalist once saw him briefly at a party, describing him thus: “Dark hair, lightly bearded, nice trainers – more I shall not say.” And this week Banksy – real name Robert or Robin Banks – was said to have been caught for the first time in the act of painting, though critics would call it “visual pollution”.

A passer-by with a camera phone clocked him extending double yellow lines from the road on to the side of an East London house to form a yellow flower. But, since his spokesman never confirms or denies that any image is by Banksy, we cannot be sure. What we do know is that he must be rich – very rich. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie reportedly have spent more than £1 million on his works this month. Last week ten works fetched £500,000 at Bonhams – £200,000 above the estimated price. He never attends his exhibitions, but the more secretive he is the more desirable his art seems to become. “I don’t have any desire for fame for me as a personality. I want tocreate picturesthat are famous,” he once said.

It is a far cry from the days when he was a disenchanted 14-year-old youth allegedly spraying on the walls of inner-city Bristol, his home town. We can go through his life story but we have no idea how much of it is true. He was born in 1974, apparently the son of a photocopying engineer, and is said to have been expelled from school where the sum total of his academic achievement was a grade E in GCSE art. He is said to have been sent to prison for a petty crime.

He started his street-graffiti career drawing freehand, but couldn’t work fast enough to evade the police so switched to stencilling. Before long he was being hailed as a “spray-can Cézanne” and by 2001 he had written a book, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, quickly followed by another, Existencilism. But his biggest achievement has been in conquering Los Angeles. His exhibition there last year was swamped by Alist celebrities.

Ironically, he says he has no desire to impress the art establishment. “He has been wholeheartedly embraced by the very establishment he satirises,” an auctioneer says. On his website is a picture of suited men admiring art in a gallery. One image is of a huge penis and the other simply a frame with the word “twat”. As he says: “I have never wanted work hung in a walled room to be seen by people eating vol-au-vents.”

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