## Step 2 - Words

Words

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Banksy melds street-fighting passion and pacifist ardor in his image of a protester whose Molotov cocktail morphs into a bouquet. (Pixelbully / Alamy) On his way to becoming an international icon, the subversive and secretive street artist turned the art world upside-down 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. Pest Control, the tongue-in-cheek-titled organization set up by the artist to authenticate the real Banksy artwork, also protects him from prying outsiders. Hiding behind a paper bag, or, more commonly, e-mail, Banksy relentlessly controls his own narrative. His last face-to-face interview took place in 2003. The Barton Hill district of Bristol in the 1980s was a scary part of town. So when Banksy, who came from a much smarter part of town, decided to go make his first expedition there, he was nervous. “My dad was badly beaten up there as a kid,” he told fellow graffiti artist and author Felix Braun. He was trying out names at the time, sometimes signing himself Robin Banx, although this soon evolved into Banksy. The shortened nickname may have demonstrated less of the gangsters’ “robbing banks” cachet, but it was more memorable—and easier to write on a wall. Banksy’s first London exhibition, so to speak, took place in Rivington Street in 2001, when he and fellow street artists convened in a tunnel near a pub. “We hung up some decorators’ signs nicked from a building site, "he later wrote, “and painted the walls white wearing overalls. We got the artwork up in 25 minutes and held an opening party later that week with beers and some hip-hop pumping out of the back of a Transit van. About 500 people turned up to an opening which had cost almost nothing to set up.” During the next 17 months, always in disguise, Banksy brought his own brand of prankster performance art to major museums, including the Louvre. There, he succeeded in installing an image of the Mona Lisa plastered with a smiley-face sticker. In New York City, he secretly attached a small portrait of a woman (which he had found and modified to show the subject wearing a gas mask) to a wall in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum took it in its stride: “I think it’s fair to say,” spokeswoman Elyse Topalian told the New York Times, “it would take more than a piece of Scotch tape to get a work of art into the Met.” While the value of his pieces soars, there is a certain sadness around some of Banksy’s creative output. A number of his works exist only in memory, or photographs. When I recently wandered in London, searching for 52 previously documented examples of Banksy’s street art, 40 works had disappeared altogether, whitewashed over or destroyed. Source: By Will Ellsworth-Jones, Smithsonian Magazine , February 2013

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