Bankable Banksy in Glasgow
Exit Through the Gift Shop
I hopped a reasonably pleasant and moderately priced train from Edinburgh to Glasgow, a wee bit over an hour’s journey costing just under £15.
En route, I encountered vivid memories of my college landscape architecture professor and his appealing and occasionally undecipherable (for an American) Glaswegian accent. His name was Ian McHarg and he often spoke of his childhood in the Scottish city, which he described as gritty and industrial.
The late Dr. McHarg (1920–2001) is revered as one of the founders, arguably even the father, of the ecological planning movement.
In his groundbreaking book, Design With Nature, the landscape architect described Glasgow as “a memorial to an inordinate capacity (of humanity) to create ugliness.”
The Scottish comedian Billy Connolly has joked, “The great thing about Glasgow is that if there’s a nuclear attack it’ll look exactly the same afterwards.”
Yet emerging from my train, I breathed seemingly clean air and entered a lush green rectangle surrounded by handsome government buildings and happening pubs.
I wasn’t here to study global warming in Glasgow, which is refreshingly cool in summer. I was here to see the Banksy exhibit in the city’s modern art museum.
This is Banksy’s first museum show in 14 years. And I could readily understand why the mysterious street artist chose Glasgow.
Glasgow is a city with a sense of humor. I pass a hair salon called “Hair That Gets You Laid” and notice Lebowski’s, a pub featuring 30 types of White Russians (now referred to as White Ukrainians).
The stately Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum prominently displays an amusing and unflattering fiberglass statue of Elvis Presley as a saint -Return to Sender- by Sean Read. (It’s also where Salvador Dali’s controversial and magnificent Christ of St John of the Cross hangs.)
Fronting the Gallery of Modern Art, the site of Banksy’s show, stands a tall bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington upon his regal steed, erected in 1844.
This classic equestrian statue is crowned with a red and white traffic cone.
I later learn that someone had initially placed a cone on the Duke’s head some forty years ago. There were many times when the city council and the police had removed it, and just as many times, it reappeared.
The mischief-makers have crowned Wellington with various colors and forms of cones, even a crocheted number. It has also been adorned with a blue surgical mask during the height of the pandemic and a cone marked “EU” was placed on the monument by anti-Brexit partisans.
A few months ago, a traffic cone arrived on Wellington’s head painted in blue and yellow in support of the people of Ukraine.
Now Glasgow’s city officials and cops don’t tamper with the conehead. The incongruously topped statue has become almost a symbol of this city.
Banksy calls Wellington and his cones, “My favorite work of art in the UK” and offers this as the reason he has chosen Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), as the site for his major exhibition.
Like Banksy, the cone placer or placers remain anonymous. And subversive. And humorous.
Banksy: Cut and Run
The extensive Banksy show, open through August 28, is titled “Cut and Run: 25 Years Card Labour.”
The pseudonymous Banksy began his career as a more typical graffiti artist, tagging walls with hand-wrought words and images, but he soon endeavored to create stencils, pre-cut cardboard designs through which he sprays paint.
Quickly — so as not to get caught and accused of defacing public or private property.
And with an assistant serving as a lookout (and he has more assistants now as his legend and remuneration have grown).
Banksy’s work can be overtly political: anti-establishment, anti-war, anti-racist, anti-misogynistic, anti-climate change, anti-homophobic, anti-child labor, anti-monarchy, or humorous, or a combination of both, or just merely kinda whimsical, irreverent and wonderful.
The original stencils, hidden away for many years (as possible evidence for criminal activity linked to the defacement of property), some since 1998, are now on display in the exhibit. There are stencils of such now famous images as Kissing Coppers — two male policemen smooching, originally from 2004.
A mother helps her spike-haired punk of a son get ready for an outing: Don’t Forget Eat Your Lunch and Make Some Trouble. Mona Lisa holds a rocket launcher. Two elderly folk dance on top of an actual bus shelter. A masked guerilla throws, not a bomb, but a floral bouquet. Another piece asks us to Vote Love. And of course there are his signature rats and monkeys.
The GoMA exhibition is brilliantly mounted and lit, with the stencils set a foot or two away from the walls, light flooding through them to create fascinating ephemeral Banksys on the walls.
I was not permitted to photograph the show but I did shoot a Banksy that appears near my New York apartment on the wall of a building owned by Zabar’s, the storied delicatessen/food emporium.
The silhouetted depiction of a little boy swinging a mallet at an functional fire hydrant has been shielded in plastic, and there is no way to remove the mural without blasting out a section of white brick wall.
The stencil that was used to create this image is in the Banksy show.
Banksy holds an unusual position in contemporary art culture as both a graffiti artist and a fine artist. The late Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom Banksy has depicted in his own work (Banksquiet, Boy and Dog in Stop and Search, 2018), and the living Kaws can also claim this duality.
Along with being a street artist and a fine artist, Banksy is also a prankster artist, like Maurizio Cattelan and Paul McCarthy, in the lineage of Marcel Duchamp.
The Glasgow show includes his stencils, but also paintings and Sirens of the Lambs, a Banksy-designed meat truck filled with sweet-faced squealing stuffed farm animal puppets that visitors to the museum are able to operate.
A fascinating display and video explain the shredding of Banksy’s painting on canvas, Girl With Balloon, at Sotheby’s London during a 2018 auction.
Seconds after the hammer pounded and the complete picture was sold for over a million dollars, a mechanical squeak ensued and a shredder built into the picture frame began to slice the artwork. It was supposed to be totally rendered into strips, but the mechanism stopped midway through its task leaving the lower half of the painting now a fringe while the upper remained extant.
It was assumed the affluent collector would no longer want the work, but the winning bidder chose to keep it…and sold it three years later for twenty times the hammer price.
Banksy retitled this iteration of Girl With Balloon as Love is in the Bin.
Just this weekend, I spotted an ad in the Financial Times requesting submissions for a Banksy auction.
When Banksy’s graffiti first began appearing in the UK streets in the 1990s, the identity of the elusive artist was unknown.
Later works surprised people across the world.
Numerous Banksys hit Los Angeles during 2002. In 2005, he created murals on an Israeli West Bank wall. In 2007, a huge stenciled wall by a tube station announced Banksy’s take on John Travolta and Sam Jackson as characters in Pulp Fiction, wielding bananas rather than guns (and was painted over by the official Transport of London).
There was Queen Victoria as a hot babe lesbian, purchased by Christina Aguilera. (Bono, Kate Moss, Damien Hirst, Chris Martin, Robbie Williams, Drake, and either Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie — depending on their divorce settlement — are also celebrity collectors. Justin Bieber has Girl With Balloon tattooed on his arm.)
Banksy often cheekily addresses serious issues.
Post-Katrina, a number of Banksys appeared in New Orleans.
There are global warming murals and anti-war murals. The artist considers the word “mural” to be a rich person’s term for graffiti. There are ten Banksys in Utah, five in San Francisco and seven in Toronto.
There are some in France referencing immigration. One depicts Steve Jobs as Son of a Migrant from Syria.
In 2017, he opened “The Walled Off Hotel” in Bethlehem, rooms featuring no view, or as Banksy puts it, “the worst view of any hotel in the world.”
Banksy recently traveled to Ukraine and portrayed people going about their daily activities in the bombed-out cities and villages. One image in the show features a gymnast balancing atop a pile of rubble.
A 2023 mural in Margate, Valentine’s Day Mascara, depicts a battered 1950s-style wife placing what is assumed to be her husband’s dead body into a 3-D freezer.
Banksy opened a pop-up boutique in New York in 2013, selling authorized paintings. Yet also at that time, an elderly man on Columbus Circle sold anonymous small Banksy images (per Banksy) for $60 each. A few years years later, a lucky buyer sold two of them for $214,000.
In 2015, he created Dismaland Bemusement Park in the UK, a Bizarro World-esque depressing theme park incorporating artwork by 50 artists including Jenny Holzer and Damien Hirst. The park featured refugees, storks covered in tar, and smashed Disney princesses. Human guides to Dismaland wore paint can lids as mouse ears.
The maquette for Dismaland is in the Glasgow show.
But who is this international man of mystery and how does he profit from his often-erased wall efforts?
It is known that he is a white Englishman from Bristol and it is now assumed that he is Robin Gunningham, a married father born in 1974. (If this is so, the Glasgow exhibition would also mark Banksy’s fiftieth birthday.)
On a placard in the show, Banksy notes, “You’d have thought by now I would have grown out of painting on things that don’t belong to me. But these days instead of lying to my mum about where I’m going when I leave the house, I’m lying to my kids.”
Elsewhere he says, ”Most artists have an obsession that defines their work. Monet had light. Hockney has color. I’ve got police response time.”
While much of his art is “temporary”, painted onto surfaces from which the work cannot be readily removed and sold, Banksy also recreates many of the images on canvas.
And makes prints. Since 2002, roughly 30,000 legitimate prints of various Banksy works have been produced.
On the website “Banksy Explained”, there are reports outlining which of his works are or have been available as paintings, signed lithographs, and small prints
For example, there were 150 signed screen-prints (20” x 27”) of his banana Pulp Fiction image and an edition of 600 were unsigned, but numbered and stamped. At auction, the signed version can go for around $150,000 and the unsigned in the neighborhood of $60,000.
A less well known Banksy image, Grannies, from 2006, originally exhibited in Los Angeles as a painting and not street art, depicting two elderly women knitting sweaters stating “Punks Not Dead” and “Thug For Life,” was released in 22”x 30” editions, 150 signed and 500 unsigned. Banksy’s unsigned, but numbered and stamped, Grannies were originally sold for $500 each and now be auctioned for around $35,000.
Non-authorized, inexpensive (and probably illegal) canvas versions of Banksy’s art can be purchased online for $35.00, not $35,000.00.
There are also fake Banksy toys readily and cheaply available on eBay.
A wily Norwegian even legally changed his name to Banksy in order to sell Banksy brand wine having nothing to do with the actual artist.
For private non-commercial use, Banksy is fine with anyone printing out his imagery.
I imagine that the museum had to sign some sort of very official contract and waver with Banksy and deal with him or his colleagues extensively over the two years of preparation for the exhibition. I’m guessing they have met with the artist in the flesh, although he may have worn a disguise, which he has been known to do.
Banksy is not represented by a gallery although galleries do deal in his work on the secondary market. He and his associates sells smaller pieces through a company called Pest Control Office. Currently, they are completely sold out.
Pest Control also authenticates work as legitimate or not.
Through the years, many of the original murals have been painted over or vandalized.
But at much expense, sections of walls across various counties have been removed to preserve the Banksys. (I have no idea what Zabar’s will do with its hammering little boy.)
Banksy graffitied the side of a mobile home, a used trailer that had been purchased years before by a British couple for one thousand pounds. With the Banksy mural now residing on its premises, it later sold for £500,000.
While he may be the invisible international man of mystery, he’s also omnipresent. Banksy was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011 for directing the documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, about a fellow graffiti artist, French-born Thierry Guetta, known as Mr. Brainwash.
In recent years, Banksy even designed the “couch gag” for an episode of The Simpsons.
And before exiting through the museum gift shop…can you imagine exiting anywhere else at a Banksy show?.. I visited a restaging of the artist’s boyhood bedroom, full of adolescent fantasies, model airplanes and movie memorabilia.
A final section of the exhibition contains formerly blank walls with dangling markers where visitors can create their very own graffiti.
After I departed the Banksy show, and before returning to Edinburgh by train, I dined on fish and chips and slurped one of the 30 White Ukrainians at Lebowskis.
Mine was laced with amaretto, a delicious tipple called The Donny, named for Steve Buscemi’s imbecilic character in The Big Lebowski.
I silently toasted Banksy and Dr. Ian McHarg.
One of Banksys’ murals features the painted words, “I don’t believe in global warming,” being drowned by rising flood waters.
