- When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur—for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga. He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head. Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him). But they do want to follow his upward trajectory from the outlaw spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of dollars in the auction houses of Britain and America. Today, he has bombed cities from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Detroit. And he has moved from graffiti on gritty urban walls to paint on canvas, conceptual sculpture and even film, with the guileful documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
There are a few Banksys is Detroit, so I'm told, although I've not seen all of them. The most famous was in the old Packard plant, which was slated for destruction. Some guys that own a gallery "rescued" it, making their gallery instantly famous around here. So famous in fact that the owners of the derelict plant sued them to get "their" painting back. What a world we live in.
Just read this piece per your comment. It mentions Banksy's visiting Detroit and the kerfuffle that followed.
He's done a pretty amazing job thus far protecting it. I don't know much about the modern art world and I've known about Banksy for at least a couple of years now. What I'm saying is that he's definitely not "unknown" or "underground". If he's been able to hide this long, surely he can continue. If Bin Ladin could do it for so long??
Well, he's been an artist for 20 years now, and only in 2010 did he become a sort of "household name." I guess he can always just move to a new town if he gets hot feet? I don't know. He's one of those harmless conscientious-objector type criminals that no one would know what to do with even if they caught him.