Who is Banksy? The Elusive Identity of Britain’s Biggest Street Artist

He’s probably the most famous street artist in the world. He’s an anti-capitalist counter-cultural maverick who’s made a fortune from capitalism. Depending on your perspective, he’s a genius visionary, a silly prankster, a cheat, or a bloody vandal who wants locking up. He’s been responsible for creating some of the most important and valuable art of the last three decades, the majority of which does not exist. He’s been voted Britain’s favourite artist, the greatest living Briton, Person of the Year, and has featured in TIME magazine’s list of 100 Most Influential People. And yet the most baffling thing about Banksy is that we still don’t know who he is.

The Accidental Vandalism of a Vandal

Saeed Ahmed had a stroke of misfortune in 2011. He was preparing to open up a new Muslim cultural centre by the name of ‘Jalalabad Islamic Centre’ on the streets of Easton in Bristol. The building had previously been home to a popular social club for over ten years, but it had fallen into a state of neglect since its glory days, and Saeed knew that he had his work cut out in getting the site back into shape.

For starters, one side of an exterior wall was in desperate need of a fresh lick of paint, as it had become pretty grimy and stained over the years, and some young scallywag had also used it as a canvas for a silly spray-painted picture of a gorilla wearing a pink mask. I’d like to think that Saeed was whistling a merry tune as he rolled up his sleeves, got out the emulsion, and started painting over this act of rebellious vandalism.

Sadly, the paint job didn’t go down particularly well with other residents of Easton, Bristol. This is because Saeed had unwittingly painted over an early original piece of street art by local legend Banksy. ‘Gorilla in a Pink Mask’ had become something of a local landmark, and it would cost thousands of pounds to restore this priceless example of a rare surviving Banksy original.

Saeed profusely apologised to the local press when the story broke, and explained that he’d never even heard of the famous street artist. He thought he was just painting over worthless juvenile scribble. To be fair, it’s not the only time in history that somebody has accidentally vandalised a piece of vandalism.

And when you’re an illegal street artist who sprays your stuff onto other people’s property without permission, the risk of seeing your work accidentally or purposefully destroyed just goes with the territory.

The Global Reach of an Anonymous Artist

The works of Banksy have unexpectedly appeared on walls, streets, bridges and trains throughout the world, from Bristol to Barcelona to Bethlehem, and lots of other place names that don’t even start with a B. The guerrilla artist’s signature stencil-style images often combine striking visuals with dark humour and subversive slogans which usually convey some kind of anti-capitalism, anti-war, anti-establishment, anti-imperialism or anti-bloody-everything message. Some of his more famous examples of street art include a young girl embracing a bomb as if it’s a cherished toy, two male police officers snogging, a police officer walking a big flossy poodle, military helicopters adorned with pretty pink bows, Mona Lisa armed with a rocket launcher, Winston Churchill rocking a Mohawk, Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta from ‘Pulp Fiction’ exchanging their guns for bananas, a teddy bear hurling a Molotov cocktail at three riot police, and Queen Victoria straddling the face of one of her female subjects.

And over the years, Banksy has branched out into flogging signed prints, hosting galleries and art installations, and pulling off high-profile comedy stunts.

But it’s quite extraordinary to think that despite enjoying the best part of three decades in the limelight, we’re still not sure of Banksy’s real identity. I mean, celebrities are generally a bit rubbish at keeping secrets, particularly when it begins to get shared with a growing inner circle of friends. There is more than likely a surprisingly large circle of people in the know with whom Banksy has personally dealt with over the years, but it appears that not one of them has ever intentionally let the cat out of the bag.

It’s like the secret that nobody wants to reveal at any price. But surely somebody must have slipped up at some point?

Not Everyone Loves Banksy

The scarce titbits of information that we know for sure about Banksy have come from his own books, films, social media posts, and a few interviews that he conducted during his early years with reporters who were sworn to secrecy.

Hailing from the Barton Hill district of Bristol, Banksy had a troubled youth during which he was expelled from school, and he later spent a short stint in prison for petty crime. There was already a big street art scene brewing in the underbelly of Bristol in the 1980s, led predominantly by a young guy known as 3D who would later find huge success in a very different medium, but more on him later. After 3D packed away his spray cans, Banksy filled the void when he formed a gang – or ‘art collective’ – known as DryBreadZ Crew who brightened up the streets of Bristol for a while in the 1990s before Banksy eventually went solo.

Although Banksy started out as a freehand graffiti artist, he changed over to stencil art for a number of reasons. In his 2005 book Wall and Peace, he claims that the main reason was down to reducing the risk of getting arrested. At the age of 18, he and his gang were painting the slogan ‘LATE AGAIN’ in big bubble letters on the side of a train when the British Transport Police showed up, prompting everyone to flee the scene in panic. Although his mates made it safely back to their car, Banksy had to make do with hiding motionless under the bottom of a dumper truck for over an hour.

As he laid there getting drenched in leaking engine oil, it occurred to him that he either needed to find a much faster way to paint or give up on the street art completely. And as he stared up at the stencilled plate on the bottom of the fuel tank, he realised that the answer was leaking all over his face. He could cut out a big chunk of the risky outdoor painting time by doing most of the hard work beforehand. This would involve drawing outlines of his art onto card and cutting out shapes for the paint to pass through, so all he had to do on the night was shove the card onto the surface and spray away.

Some graffiti artists are a bit dismissive of the stencil approach and consider it to be cheating. Perhaps they’ve got a point. Banksy also once claimed that the reason he moved over to stencil art is because he was a bit crap at freehand art.

In fact, it has to be said that whilst Banksy may have an army of devoted fans, he certainly has his fair share of critics. Whilst Banksy has always been very open about how he was greatly influenced by the French graffiti artist Blek le Rat who used to spray paint stencil pictures of rats on the streets of Paris in the early ’80s, some say that Banksy effectively just stole his strategy and his style. Rats are a common theme in Banksy’s work which also emulates the stencil strategy and political commentary and subversive humour of Blek le Rat’s street art. Whilst Blek le Rat himself is usually enthusiastic about Banksy’s work, he did once admit in a documentary interview that some of Banksy’s stuff makes him feel angry, when he noted: “It’s difficult to find a technique and style in art, so when you have a style and you see someone else is taking it and reproducing it, you don’t like that.”

Other critics are not impressed with the finished result which they feel amounts to little more than lazy and vague sloganeering for a middle-class hipster audience. Black Mirror creator and Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker once wrote an entire piece which ripped Banksy to shreds and observed that his work “looks dazzlingly clever. To idiots.”

Another sector of the public who don’t much care for Banksy are the kind of people who view him as a criminal. To be fair, these people also have a point. Spraying graffiti in public places is an illegal activity which amounts to criminal damage. And let’s not forget that there’s a very good reason why Banksy was keen to hide his true identity in the early days. It was nothing to do with creating an enigmatic and mysterious persona. It was simply because he didn’t want to be arrested for vandalism.

Of course, these days, he’ll more than likely get away with it. Whenever a surprise new piece of Banksy graffiti surfaces on the streets, it will usually be embraced and promoted as a positive addition to the landscape. Yet if a 14-year-old kid got caught spraying the exact same artwork in the exact same location, he would more than likely be given a clip around the lughole and slapped with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order.

It doesn’t always seem entirely fair. Still, not everyone agrees that Banksy should be exempt from the law just because he’s a celebrity. In 2008, Westminster City Council took the relatively unusual step of quickly painting over a Banksy piece entitled ‘One Nation Under CCTV’.

The chairman of the council Robert Davis defended this decision to the press: “Banksy has no more right to paint graffiti than a child. If we condone this, then we might as well say that any kid with a spray can is producing art. To go and deface other people’s property is graffiti.

Just because he’s famous doesn’t give him that right.”

A year earlier in 2007, the ‘Pulp Fiction’ parody featuring John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson wielding bananas was painted over by Transport for London who felt that the artwork painted onto a wall near the Old Street tube station in London created an atmosphere of neglect and social decay which encouraged crime. One miffed resident wrote a letter of complaint to the local paper: “Banksy’s latest work of art is superb. If the council wants to do something, it should cut down that dreadful shrub which is obscuring the piece.”

And as recently as February 2023, a piece of new Banksy art which popped up on the side of a house in Margate, Kent was officially dismantled with almost suspicious haste. ‘Valentine’s Day Mascara’ was an unusual piece as it incorporated physical objects into the artwork. Believed to be a statement on domestic abuse and violence against women, the art depicts a 1950s housewife with a swollen eye and missing tooth shoving her husband into a chest freezer which is actually a real abandoned freezer found in a nearby street.

The piece is topped off with other abandoned physical objects including a broken patio garden chair and an empty beer bottle. Although both the tenant and the landlord of the property were impressed with the result, the tenant was horrified when council workers arrived the very next morning to throw the physical objects into a truck and effectively ruin the piece, despite the tenant’s passionate protests. She later complained: “No one was interested if rubbish was on the street.

I mean, they were, but not that quickly. Even if you report something to them about taking the rubbish, they are acting one or two weeks later, not immediately.” That might be something to bear in mind if you live in Margate and your street has started to look like an overflowing dustbin.

Don’t tell the council that the rubbish urgently needs sorting out. Just tell them that Banksy has paid you a visit, and they’ll be with you faster than a toupee in a hurricane.

Missing Presumed Wiped

None of this controversy appears to have done Banksy much harm in the long term. After branching out from the streets of Bristol and London in the late 1990s, his acts of illegal vandalism gained a wider and highly appreciative audience over the next two decades as his works turned up in such places as San Francisco, Vienna, the Gaza Strip, and Ukraine. But the problem with street art is that it’s not always destined to last for a particularly long time. In fact, it’s believed that the vast majority of Banksy’s original street art no longer exists.

Aside from those official removals, there have been plenty of cock-ups in which artwork was mistakenly whitewashed by council contractors who felt that they were just doing their job in getting the streets clean but hadn’t been made aware of the significance of the iconic artwork they were destroying. One particularly famous image of a parachuting rat had enjoyed a 15-year stint on a wall in Prahran, Victoria, Australia before a group of clumsy builders unwittingly destroyed it when they smashed through the wall to install piping for a proposed new café.

Other pieces have been defaced or naturally damaged over the years, although some mysterious disappearances were down to sheer greed. An image depicting a child holding a crowbar like a shovel whilst building a sandcastle had adorned the side of a shop in Suffolk for many years. The sandcastle was a physical element which had long been lost to the sands of time, but the main artwork of the child remained intact until one day in 2021 when the whole segment of the wall just vanished.

This wasn’t theft. The owner of the property had originally had the shop valued at around £300,000, but later discovered that Banksy’s artwork had increased the value to half a million. However, he didn’t seem too keen on the idea of selling the shop.

Instead, he just had the entire section of the wall dismantled and bundled into a van so that it could be sold for an undisclosed sum at an auction in California, much to the annoyance of local residents who found the move to be greedy and disrespectful to the community. Still, you can’t really blame him in a way as he was the rightful owner of the shop, and he probably made a mint from someone defacing the side of it.

It doesn’t always work out that way. Spare a thought for 60-year-old Sam Kahn who ran a market stall in London selling suitcases and football scarves. After discovering that Banksy had vandalised the side of his stall, Sam thought he’d done pretty well out of it when he accepted an offer from a random stranger to buy the artwork for a grand. But Sam should have spent a little more time reading up on Banksy. It turns out that the graffiti on his stall was probably worth closer to half a million.

It’s worth noting that any piece of Banksy artwork is likely to be much more valuable if it has received a certificate of authentication from Pest Control – this is the cheekily-named handling service set up by Banksy and overseen by his management to protect genuine Banksy pieces and prevent fakes from flooding the market. However, with just a very few exceptions, you’re never going to get a certificate for his street art as this was never intended for sale in the first place, and Banksy does not condone the selling of street art which has been removed from public view. So whilst the owner of that shop may have made a few quid, it won’t have gone down well with either Banksy or Pest Control, and he wouldn’t have been able to get his hands on a certificate.

Instead of tearing down a Banksy piece or nicking an entire section of wall, you’d probably be better off just buying a genuine signed and certified print reproduction of the original piece. Whilst most of Banksy’s original street art may not have survived, the imagery at least lives on in his print reproductions which regularly exchange hands at art auctions for vast sums of money. And this is because by the turn of the millennium, Banksy had chosen to expand beyond the confines of street art which would be fairly difficult to take on tour and show off in exhibitions.

Now on the brink of anonymous mega stardom, Banksy had taken an interest in displaying his prints and portraits and weird art installations in star-studded gallery exhibitions around the world. If you ever visit one yourself, just bear in mind that you’re unlikely to catch a glimpse of the celebrity host. Or rather, you might well catch a glimpse of the celebrity host lurking in the background, but you’ll be completely unaware that you did.

Exhibitions and Provocations

Of course, a Banksy exhibition isn’t much like your average art exhibition. In one of his early exhibitions in London in 2005, he surprised visitors by randomly releasing two hundred live rats into the gallery – another possible homage to his hero Blek le Rat.

One of Banksy’s most famous exhibitions entitled ‘Barely Legal’ was held a year later in Los Angeles and attracted some pretty prestigious visitors and buyers, including Keanu Reeves, Jude Law, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie. Banksy appeared to be enjoying this step into Hollywood. In his own words: “Hollywood is a town where they honour their heroes by writing their names on the pavement to be walked on by fat people and peed on by dogs. It seemed like a great place to come and be ambitious.”

One of the more controversial pieces on display here was a portrait of Mother Teresa captioned with the heartwarming slogan: “I learnt a valuable lesson from this woman. Moisturise every day.”

However, it has to be said that there was an elephant in the room at the ‘Barely Legal’ exhibition. I mean, there was literally an 8,000 pound live elephant on display which had been coated in red paint and decorated to match the surrounding floral wallpaper. This was apparently meant to be a statement on global poverty. According to the fliers: “There’s an elephant in the room. 20 billion people live below the poverty line.”

However, animal rights activists were more concerned that the sorrowful elephant appeared to have been drenched in toxic paint. And whilst the owners of the elephant insisted that it had appeared in many movies and was used to a bit of make-up, the elephant had been hosed down for the final day of the exhibition.

Banksy The Prankster

When he’s not releasing live rats and dragging painted elephants into his galleries, Banksy often likes to amuse himself in other ways, and some might say that he’s just as famous for his comedy pranks and stunts than his artwork.

In 2006, he managed to briefly install an unsolicited piece of art alongside the path of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad in Disneyland in California. It was an inflatable doll dressed up in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs in what was meant to be a statement on the plight of the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. This was on display for ninety minutes before the ride was temporarily closed down so that the Guantanamo Bay prisoner could be escorted from the premises.

A couple of years earlier, whilst wearing a disguise consisting of a trenchcoat and a fake beard, he’d managed to sneak a new version of the Mona Lisa into the Louvre in Paris complete with a new smiley-face sticker. And in 2005, he caused more than a little embarrassment for the British Museum when he planted a new supposedly authentic cave painting depicting a caveman pushing a shopping trolley. The British Museum was clearly caught napping as this painting was baffling visitors for three whole days before it was eventually spotted by staff and taken down.

However, perhaps Banksy’s most legendary stunt of all was the notorious shredding incident – although it’s debatable who exactly had the last laugh with this one. ‘Girl with Balloon’ first appeared as a piece of street art on the side of a shop in Shoreditch in 2002, but it was removed by the owners in 2017 and sold for a reported £500,000. The image depicts a young girl reaching out for a balloon which is being carried away by the wind, alongside the caption “There Is Always Hope”. This is apparently a critique on how modern society forces children to grow up too fast.

Although the original may have been removed, a framed canvas version exchanged hands several times before it was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in London in 2018 where it fetched £1.04 million – a new record high for a Banksy piece. But things appeared to go a bit pear-shaped at the exact same second that the gavel came down on the sale. Unbeknown to the seller, the buyer, or Sotheby’s, the picture was hiding what was presumably a remote-controlled shredding device within the frame. As the gavel came down, the picture suddenly began to slide out of the bottom of the frame in freshly shredded form, much to the audible surprise of the audience, the auctioneers, and the poor woman who had just shelled out over a million quid for a few tatty bits of paper.

It’s not known for sure how the device was activated, although there was a suspicious looking geezer in the crowd wearing tinted spectacles who just happened to be filming the whole thing on his mobile phone. It’s possible that he somehow activated the shredder at the perfect moment, and of course it’s possible that the bloke in question was Banksy himself. It was certainly this same footage which appeared on Banksy’s own Instagram account the following day. This was accompanied by footage of the original installation of the shredding mechanism concealed in the frame, and a caption which read: “A few years ago, I secretly built a shredder into a painting…in case it was ever put up for auction.”

The shredding didn’t entirely go to plan on the day, though. The idea had been for the mechanism to shred the whole image as it slipped through the bottom of the frame, but it jammed about halfway through leaving the top of the painting intact. So the buyer couldn’t complain too much, as they were still getting half a picture for their million pounds. Another caption on Banksy’s Instagram glumly noted: “In rehearsals, it worked every time…”

In the immediate aftermath of the partial self-destruction, Sotheby’s played it cool. The auctioneer hastily announced that it was time to move on, while employees quickly grabbed what was left of the painting and bundled it out of view. Sotheby’s later officially declared that they “had been Banksy-ed” and insisted that they were most definitely not in on the prank, although some have speculated why nobody from the auction house bothered to question the ridiculous size and weight of the frame.

One artist and blacksmith from Chicago by the name of Josh Gilbert reckons that the comedy stunt was not quite what it seemed. After studying the shredding and the Instagram footage of the mechanism, the former magician insists that the whole incident was an illusion. Josh claims that the shredding mechanism just didn’t make sense, and that the blades weren’t sitting anywhere near the painting. He believes that the real painting actually just rolled down into a hidden compartment at the back of the frame, whilst a pre-shredded version slid out from the bottom.

However, the general consensus is that ‘Girl with Balloon’ was genuinely partially shredded, and this left the auction house, the seller, and the buyer with a prickly million-pound problem. Although the buyer – identified only as a European woman – was initially a bit annoyed to see her new purchase torn to bits within seconds of buying it, she eventually decided to proceed with the sale anyway. She said: “At first I was shocked, but gradually I began to realise that I would end up with my own piece of art history!”

It was unclear for a while if the shredding would destroy or enhance the value of the work. Some art experts suggested that it might actually double the value of the piece. In fact, it did much more than that, and it turned out the buyer had made a shrewd decision in pushing on with the purchase.

Shortly after the incident, Banksy announced that the piece had been given the new name of ‘Love in the Bin’, and Pest Control quickly re-authenticated the work with its new title. At this point, Sotheby’s got quite excited and exclaimed: “Banksy didn’t destroy an artwork in the auction, he created one! This is the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction!”

The buyer had reason to be excited, too. Within the space of just three years, she put up the partially shredded piece for auction at Sotheby’s where it was sold to an anonymous Asian collector for over £18 million. This does make you wonder if Banksy’s original intention of vandalising a piece of expensive artwork and wrecking an auction kind of backfired, or whether his move to retitle and reauthenticate the piece indicated a change of heart since he first constructed the shredding mechanism years earlier. It also makes you wonder where exactly he gets his money from.

Sell Out!

Banksy’s net worth is estimated to be in the region of $50 million, although I’m not entirely sure where that figure has been plucked from. It’s hard enough to ascertain a genuine net worth when you know who it is you’re meant to be talking about. Whilst many Banksy pieces have fetched considerable sums at auction, the truth is that Banksy is not the one getting rich from those sales.

In fact, he usually sells his stuff for very reasonable prices which later balloons in value at auctions, but it’s the dealers who are raking in all the profits from the artist’s original work. And it must be frustrating on some level when he flogs a print for a few hundred pounds, only to see it raise tens of millions for the buyer a few years down the line. It may have been during one of those darker moments when he first came up with the idea of the shredding mechanism.

Then of course there’s the street art which he provides for free but which often gets dismantled by the lucky owner of the chunk of wall which the artist chose to use as his canvas. Plenty of other people are making a fortune from Banksy, but the artist himself doesn’t always seem too bothered about chasing the dough. In the past, he’s claimed to have turned down four lucrative advertising jobs for Nike, whilst his website has encouraged visitors to download and print his images for free. He even recommends hanging around at work until everyone in the office has gone for lunch, and using the company’s gloss paper and printer ink.

On the rare occasions that Banksy auctions off an original piece, all the proceeds are usually given to a good cause. To pick just a couple of examples from a quite incredible list, he sold three original paintings in 2020 which formed a triptych entitled Mediterranean Sea View. The sale raised £2.2 million which was donated to a hospital in Bethlehem. And during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, he expressed his gratitude to National Health Service workers in the UK by gifting a painting to a hospital in Southampton. The piece entitled ‘Game Changer’ depicted a boy playing with a nurse doll dressed in a superhero costume, and it went on to raise £14.4 million at Christie’s, with all the profits going to NHS-related organisations and charities.

He can occasionally get a bit shirty if he feels that other businesses are profiting from his designs. Back in 2019, he took legal action against a British greeting cards company called Full Colour Black who were selling cards featuring photographs of a piece of Banksy’s street art called ‘Flower Thrower’. Pest Control had acquired the trademark rights for this piece in 2014, and Banksy seemed to think that Full Colour Black were attempting to take custody of both the trademark and his own name.

He released a statement which grumbled: “A greetings cards company is contesting the trademark I hold to my art, and attempting to take custody of my name so they can sell their fake Banksy merchandise legally. I think they’re banking on the idea I won’t show up in court to defend myself.”

The matter went all the way to the European Union Intellectual Property Office who questioned whether Banksy had ever even made use of the trademark which is meant to be exploited within the first five years of registration. As he still had a tiny window of time remaining, Banksy took the quite shameless step of randomly launching a new pop-up store in Croydon, South London which went by the catchy name of Gross Domestic Product. The store naturally sold a few products relating to the ‘Flower Thrower’ design, and this was meant to prove that Banksy was indeed making use of his own trademark. But Gross Domestic Product also sold a range of other products labelled as “impractical and offensive” including disco balls made from police riot helmets, a children’s counting toy which comes complete with wooden migrant figures and a big haulage truck, and a handbag made from a house brick.

Not that you could just go into the store and buy any of this stuff as the doors never opened. Instead, you had to enter a weird online lottery system and answer vague questions about the meaning of art, after which only a small group of lucky people would be deemed worthy of being a customer. As a business model, it sounds a bit rubbish. And of course, such a blatantly half-arsed attempt to fulfil trademark requirements under EU law was never destined to go down well with the Intellectual Property Office.

I can’t help feeling that Banksy may have picked the wrong battle to begin with. It’s not as if Full Colour Black was a massive corporate company corporation intent on screwing over Banksy. It was a tiny three-person business which was selling legal photographs of public graffiti. In their defence, they also claimed that they had tried to offer royalties to Banksy but had been met with a defaced wall of silence.

It’s possible that Banksy may have had more success if he’d been able to acquire the copyright for ‘Flower Thrower’ as this specifically prevents copying, reproduction, or distribution of specific pieces of work, rather than just protecting the unique identification of a brand or logo. But this would have required him to reveal his identity. Besides, as Banksy himself once pointed out in one of his books: “Copyright is for losers.”

The panel judges from the EU Intellectual Property Office actually referenced this quote when they ruled in favour of Full Colour Black and noted Banksy’s disdain for copyright law. They felt that Banksy was simply trying to circumvent copyright laws by filing a trademark claim in bad faith and resorting to actions which were inconsistent with honest practices.

This kind of thing does throw up a few troubling inconsistencies and ironies in the long career of the counter-cultural hero. He’s the anti-corporate guerrilla artist who has no truck with copyright but still decides to hire expensive lawyers to sue a small business over a piffling trademark dispute. And he’s the anti-establishment and anti-capitalist crusader who has grown incredibly wealthy by becoming part of the same establishment he was meant to be satirising.

It’s true that he doesn’t pick up the millions of pounds that his work fetches at auction, but he’s almost certainly done pretty well for himself from private sales, bestselling books, and hit films including the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop which grossed over $5 million at the box office. (He asked the Academy if he could attend the ceremony in a monkey mask, but permission was refused, so he didn’t show up. Although I suppose it’s possible that Banksy is actually George Clooney.)

Critics have pointed out that Banksy can hardly still describe himself as a social activist from the streets when he’s attracting wealthy celebrity buyers at glitzy art exhibitions in Hollywood. Some have even bluntly accused the artist of being a corporate sell-out. It’s an accusation which Banksy has defended in print.

He says: “I have been called a sell-out, but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want? The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that’s an easy problem to solve. You just stop whingeing and give it all away.

I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for me.” He does however concede that it’s not always easy for an anti-capitalist to entirely escape the capitalist riches gained from protesting about capitalism. “I love the way capitalism finds a place - even for its enemies.

It’s definitely boom time in the discontent industry. I mean, how many cakes does Michael Moore get through?”

Still, wrestling with this kind of inner conflict must be enough to trigger an identity crisis in the wealthy anti-establishment anonymous celebrity superstar. And if he’s struggling with his own identity, how are the rest of us supposed to know where to start in figuring it out?

The Suspects

You’ll notice that I’ve been referring to Banksy as a ‘he’ throughout this article, and of course we can’t just take that for granted. There don’t appear to be any compelling female suspects in the frame, though. And the strongest case put forward for Banksy being a woman is that unlike the vast majority of street art, women are depicted in Banksy’s work. Oh, and a female artist is briefly glimpsed in Exit Through the Gift Shop. There’s not much else to go on really, but that doesn’t mean it can be ruled out completely.

Before we move onto the major suspects – and there are two in particular who seem highly credible – it’s worth mentioning some of the many false alarms. In 2013, a story circulated in the press which seemed to confirm that Banksy’s identity had finally been revealed. A Liverpudlian by the name of Paul Horner had apparently been apprehended in the act by a vigilante ‘Anti-Graffiti Task Force’ which had ultimately led to Banksy’s arrest and public unmasking.

In fact, the story was first broken by the fake news website National Report and was written by an American hoax writer by the name of… Paul Horner. Despite the story swiftly getting debunked after newspapers and websites spread the report without checking the facts, it continued to resurface for years to follow.

In 2014, Brooklyn engineer Richard Pfeiffer was arrested by police in Manhattan after he was supposedly caught in the act polishing off the latest Banksy piece. One of the police officers on the scene insisted that they saw Richard do it, and a marker pen was found in the suspect’s pocket. Richard had actually just been walking down the street with his girlfriend, and they had both paused to admire the supposed Banksy piece before the police swooped in.

The piece in question has never even been officially confirmed as the work of Banksy, and Richard was able to demonstrate that the marker in his pocket was not the same one used for the drawing. But he still had to put up with being detained for 24 hours, and the case wasn’t officially dropped until months later.

Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia, a video surfaced in 2016 which quickly went viral. The female YouTuber behind the camera comes across a mysterious bespectacled man in a hooded sweatshirt who, with the aid of an accomplice, is finishing off a painting on a wall which has clearly been signed off as Banksy. The man doesn’t seem to take too kindly to being filmed.

After telling the YouTuber to fuck off, he runs away from the scene and manages to ultimately evade the woman in hot pursuit. Whether this was staged or not is unclear, but Banksy’s team have insisted that the artwork is fake, and pointed out that the piece does not match Banksy’s signature style.

Photographic evidence of a much more authentic nature surfaced much earlier in 2004, when a man in a high-vis jacket was snapped as he began work on the painting of a massive rat on the side of the White Horse pub in Liverpool. The piece was later identified as a genuine Banksy, and it’s very probable that the man in the photograph is indeed the man behind the artwork. The only frustrating niggle is that you can’t really see his face in the crap photograph.

King Robbo

So let’s move onto some of the slightly more credible suspects which don’t involve hoax news stories or wrongful arrests by lying police officers. For quite a while, there was an intriguing theory that Banksy’s alter-ego was one of his own biggest rivals – an underground graffiti artist by the name of King Robbo whose parents knew him as John Robertson. At the age of just 15, King Robbo had painted a graffiti piece on the side of a canal wall in London. Entitled ‘King Robbo Incorporated’, the piece was only accessible by water, which possibly explains why the authorities couldn’t be arsed to remove it, unlike the majority of Robbo’s other works.

King Robbo later claimed that he had been pleased as punch to be introduced to Banksy at a swanky party in the 1990s. But whereas Robbo had extended the hand of friendship, he claims that Banksy was snootily dismissive and had tried to make out that he had never even heard of Robbo or his work, prompting Robbo to eventually slap him in the face with the words “You won’t forget me now, will you?” Bearing in mind that Robbo was 6ft 8 inches tall and built like a brick shithouse, it was Banksy who wisely left the party.

This led to a rather childish feud in which the pair began defacing each other’s work and producing new pieces which trashed the other artist. Most notably, King Robbo’s famous canal piece was allegedly defaced by Banksy who added the letters ‘FUC’ to the beginning of the slogan, so that instead of reading ‘King Robbo Inc’, it now read ‘Fucking Robbo Inc’.

It was long speculated that King Robbo and Banksy were one and the same person, and that he was actually arguing with himself to create a fake graffiti war. There are certain aspects of the story that do seem a bit weird. If King Robbo really did hate Banksy so much and knew his real identity, you’d think he would have been tempted to reveal it. But this theory doesn’t hold much water nowadays, largely because King Robbo tragically died in 2014, a state of affairs which didn’t seem to hinder Banksy’s future work.

Jamie Hewlett

A more likely living suspect is the comic book creator, illustrator, and songwriter Jamie Hewlett who is probably most famous for creating the ‘Tank Girl’ comic books and co-founding the virtual band Gorillaz with Blur frontman Damon Albarn.

Some of Banksy’s artwork has appeared in Gorillaz music videos, whilst there’s also a strong connection with Blur – Banksy painted a mural specifically to promote a Blur single, whilst in a rare commercial move that helped him pay the bills, he was also commissioned to create the artwork for Blur’s underwhelming 2003 album Think Tank.

But there may also be a financial connection between Banksy and Jamie Hewlett. In 2018, a forensic expert – who requested to remain anonymous over fears of receiving hate mail after unmasking Banksy – claimed to have made a startling discovery. He reckoned that he’d obtained access to company paper trails which proved that Jamie Hewlett had a financial connection with every single company that Banksy had ever been involved with. The expert told the press: “I really believe it could be Jamie Hewlett.

Or at least he seems to own all things Banksy.”

This paper trail has never been shared with the public, so it’s hard to know for sure. And Jamie Hewlett enjoys such a busy career in his own right as an award-winning comic artist and writer and music video director and band member, it’s hard to see how he’d find the time or inclination to be Banksy on the side.

But it’s interesting to note that an official Banksy publicist took the time to deny this allegation in a statement which read: “I can confirm that Jamie Hewlitt is not the artist Banksy.” It’s equally interesting to note that she spelt Jamie’s surname wrong in the statement. Could this have been a careless typo, a purposeful ploy to fuel more speculation, or an attempt to ensure that this official denial wasn’t technically a lie?

Neil Buchanan

My favourite theory by far is that Banksy is none other than cheerful Liverpudlian children’s TV presenter Neil Buchanan. Although Neil first turned to TV presenting as far back as the early 1980s, he’s perhaps best known as the host behind the long-running ‘Art Attack’ show which originally ran from 1990 to 2007. Not only was this show famous for its hugely ambitious large-scale art projects undertaken by Neil himself, it was also famous for giving the world its first visual glimpse of a very young Simon Whistler in 1999.

I found it hard to get my head around this theory at first as it just seems so unfathomably unlikely. Neil is a creative genius, but he also comes across as a bubbly and ridiculously enthusiastic individual who is clearly very much suited to the medium of kids’ television. The idea of him ever being part of a rebellious underground graffiti scene just seems absurd.

But it turns out that Neil had something of a surprisingly colourful history before he moved into children’s television. In 1976, he formed an angry heavy metal band called Marseille who may be largely forgotten today as they didn’t achieve mainstream success, but they did win a ‘UK Battle of the Bands’ competition in 1977, and went on to tour the United States, performing alongside the likes of Judas Priest and Whitesnake. Neil left the band amidst messy legal disputes in 1980, although the original line-up reformed for a reunion tour and new album around twenty years later.

The theory that Neil might also be Banksy is rooted in the idea that several Banksy pieces have popped up in locations where Marseille used to perform gigs. But Neil didn’t seem too keen on the association, and his official website tried to shut down the rumours in 2020 when they posted: “Neil Buchanan ISN’T Banksy. We have been inundated with enquiries over the weekend regarding the current social media story. Unfortunately, this website does not have the infrastructure to answer all these enquiries individually, however we can confirm that there is no truth in the rumour whatsoever.”

So that’s settled then. Besides, despite his heavy metal roots, Neil Buchanan is still probably a bit too commercial and corporate to be Banksy, and may even have a fatter bank account. It’s reported that when the time came to sell the rights to ‘Art Attack’, he pocketed the sum of £14 million. That’s about the same money he would have raised by performing in Marseille gigs every single night for 150,000 years.

Billy Gannon

Perhaps the strangest and most bewildering theory also appears to be the only theory that led to surprisingly dramatic consequences in which somebody lost their job.

In 2022, 58-year-old Billy Gannon was elected unopposed to the Pembroke Dock council in Southwest Wales but found himself almost immediately mired in allegations that he was actually the street vandal Banksy.

It’s true that Billy had long served as a celebrated local community artist and had contributed artwork to hospital walls and children’s playgrounds. He’s also a big fan of Banksy. He admitted to the press: “I absolutely love him. Or him/her/them. The guy’s a hero. He’ll always have a special place in my heart. His work is for everyone.”

To be honest, it’s pretty obvious that Billy is not Banksy. For starters, he’s way too old unless Banksy was pushing thirty by the time he first started spray-painting graffiti in public places. But that didn’t stop the local circulation of the rumours, alongside allegations that a Pembroke Dock councillor was operating under a false identity and had lied about his age.

It was starting to get a little troublesome for poor Billy. In his own words: “The problem I have is that when I say to people, ‘I am not Banksy,’ I can see this look in their eyes, and they say, ‘That’s what Banksy would say.’”

Billy strongly believed that the malicious rumours were originally spread by a former Pembroke Dock councillor who had an axe to grind over Billy’s new position. If this was true, it would seem that the perpetrator achieved his goal, as Billy Gannon swiftly took the surprising decision to resign, making him possibly the only UK councillor in history to have been forced into a resignation on the grounds that he wasn’t somebody else.

It might seem a bit drastic to quit your job over such a silly rumour. Billy pointed out that he felt the rumours were undermining his ability to carry on working, and that they were a distraction to the important issues of the town, as everyone was just banging on about how there was an imposter sitting on the council. More significantly, the rumours appeared to be sparking a fresh wave of vandalism in the town, as pranksters began spraying amateurish Banksy-esque graffiti all over the local parks, benches, walls, and dustbins. Billy felt that the only way to stop the vandalism was to step down from his job.

Even after he quit, he continued to be heckled in the streets, prompting him to form a new ‘I Am Not Banksy’ movement. Using a cheap badge-making machine, Billy intends to create and distribute as many ‘I Am Not Banksy’ badges as he possibly can in what may prove to be a devilishly cunning plan. The idea is that if you are not Banksy, you should take an ‘I Am Not Banksy’ badge and wear it wherever you go. If you are in fact Banksy, then you should most definitely not take a badge and not wear it wherever you go.

If everyone in the world is offered a badge at some point and follows this guidance, we should eventually be able to ascertain the real identity of the artist. Billy Gannon was clearly wasted on the council. Stay tuned for updates.

Goldie’s Slip-Up

Before we move onto the main two suspects, it’s worth noting that the cat may well have been let out of the bag during a slip-up in a podcast interview in 2017. Goldie struck it big in the 1990s when he became a prominent figure in the UK music scene, notably dabbling in jungle, drum and bass, and breakbeat hardcore. He’s still pretty famous these days, although you’re far more likely to catch him prancing about on Strictly Come Dancing, Big Brother, Come Dine with Me, and, I dunno, Celebrity Pigeon Racing.

Goldie certainly seems like the kind of guy who would know the real identity of Banksy. Partly because he used to be a young graffiti artist himself in the 1980s. But mainly because the pair have both acknowledged that they are good friends, and Banksy claims that Goldie’s street art was a major influence on his own career.

During that 2017 interview in the ‘Distraction Pieces’ podcast, Goldie started talking about how he felt that the real graffiti scene was still largely misunderstood by the masses, whilst it was a piece of piss to sell any old piece of merch that looked a bit like Banksy’s stuff. The way he put it: “Give me a bubble letter and put it on a t-shirt and write ‘Banksy’ on it and we’re sorted… We can sell it now.”

Just in case anyone thought he might be dissing his mate Banksy, Goldie immediately followed this up with: “No disrespect to Rob. I think he’s a brilliant artist. He has flipped the world of art over.”

There was a bit of an awkward pause here in the podcast before Goldie briskly changed the subject as if nothing had happened and he hadn’t just revealed the real first name of Banksy live on air.

And get this: One of the main two suspects has the first name of Rob. So we may as well get ready to reveal the true identity of Banksy in the next sentence. Oh, hang on a minute, though. Both of the two main suspects have the first name of Rob. Damn.

Robert “3D” Del Naja

You may remember that right near the beginning of this article, we mentioned a Bristol graffiti artist who went by the name of 3D and who inspired Banksy to take up a spray can after 3D embarked upon a very different career path. That different career path involved forming the hugely acclaimed and multi-award-winning trip hop collective Massive Attack who went on to regularly top the UK album charts. I can remember they briefly had to change their name to simply ‘Massive’ for one of their biggest ever singles ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ in 1991 as they felt that a band named ‘Massive Attack’ wouldn’t get any radio support during the ongoing Gulf War.

But perhaps Robert “3D” Del Naja was more than just an inspiration for Banksy. Perhaps 3D was Banksy all along.

Banksy and 3D have always acknowledged that they are friends. Banksy provided the foreword for 3D’s 2015 book 3D and the Art of Massive Attack, which might have been a fairly simple business negotiation if they were the same person. And it’s also worth noting that Goldie and 3D are also very good friends, leading to speculation that this must surely be the Rob that Goldie accidentally mentioned in that 2017 podcast.

But UK journalism graduate Craig Williams dished up some slightly more interesting evidence in 2016 when he began to draw intriguing correlations between Massive Attack gigs and the appearances of new street art from Banksy. Following rumours surfacing in Italy that Banksy and 3D were one and the same, Craig began delving into the history of both and dug up some quite incredible coincidences. Craig lists dozens of examples in which Banksy and 3D appeared to be in roughly the same location at the same time.

To pluck just a few examples from a very long list: Massive Attack played a show at Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl in 2006, just around a week after Banksy pulled off the ‘Guantanamo Bay Prisoner’ stunt in Disneyland. In 2008, 3D made a documentary on Hurricane Katrina, at round about the same time that Banksy was painting the streets of New Orleans. And just a few days after Massive Attack played a concert in San Francisco, no less than six new Banksy murals popped up around the city.

Both Banksy and 3D – if indeed they are separate entities – have denied the connection. When Banksy was asked by a Bristol community magazine if he could confirm that he was in fact the frontman of Massive Attack, he bluntly responded: “No, because I’m not.”

Meanwhile, 3D gave a slightly lengthier response during a later interview. He said: “It’s wishful thinking. It’s a good story, but sadly not true. He’s a mate and he’s been to some of the gigs. It’s purely a matter of logistics and coincidence, nothing more than that.”

It’s a pretty hefty list of logistics and coincidences, though. And I can’t help feeling that Robert “3D” Del Naja would almost certainly have been the prime suspect in the Banksy mystery. If it wasn’t for the other Rob.

Robin Gunningham

It looks as if Banksy’s face may have been captured on camera as early as 2004. During a period when it was known that Banksy had flown to Jamaica to work on several art projects, a photograph emerged which appeared to show the artist at work in Jamaica with spray cans and stencils at his feet. You could even clearly see his face on this one.

It was a picture of a fairly ordinary-looking guy wearing a smile, blue shirt, and jeans. The only slight niggle is that he wasn’t immediately recognisable. This was certainly no 3D or Jamie Hewlett or Neil Buchanan.

It seemed to suggest that the career of Banksy was no side venture from a celebrity well known in another field. Instead, Banksy was just an unknown guy with an unfamiliar face. The kind of face that could probably hang around unseen and unnoticed at art galleries and exhibitions and auctions and movie premieres.

Which kind of makes a lot more sense when you think about it.

The Mail on Sunday newspaper claimed to have finally identified the face in the photograph in 2015. During an impressively extensive investigation into the matter which even involved tracking down the guy’s old school friends and family – more on that in a bit - they reckon that the face belonged to a Bristol street artist by the name of Robin Gunningham.

Born in 1973 in a wealthier suburb of Bristol, a young Robin actually attended a pretty expensive public school called Bristol Cathedral which may disappoint some Banksy fans who like to think that he was somehow born in a subway and raised by wolves.

A 1989 school photograph of Rob Gunningham was dug up which certainly seems to resemble the guy caught in the 2004 snap, and many of Robin’s old school friends are convinced that their old mate Rob did indeed go on to become Banksy. Apparently, the famous moniker was derived from Rob’s old school nickname ‘Robin Banks’ which the artist later shortened to Banksy.

His old mates remember Robin as being an extremely gifted artist, whilst the former neighbour of the family home had this to say when interviewed: “The family was always very nice. I don’t know for sure but I think Robin was working as a graffiti artist. He worked for other people and would disappear for months on end. He was quite nomadic.

I would not go as far as to say he went off the rails, but there was some sort of rift in the family, probably because he didn’t turn out quite as they hoped. He just disappeared after he left home.”

The dates certainly seem to add up, as Robin left Bristol and moved to London in the late 1990s, in a move which mirrors the journey of Banksy.

Just to put the newspaper investigation on pause for a moment, it’s also worth noting that around a year after The Mail on Sunday ran their story, researchers at Queen Mary University in London showed their full support for the theory when they published a report which revealed that geographic profiling backed up the idea. This method of statistical mapping is more commonly used to monitor criminals and repeat offenders, or monitor the spread of infectious diseases, but in this case the university researchers used it for the far more important task of potentially identifying a graffiti artist.

The geographic profiling essentially attempted to find patterns between the locations of 140 Banksy works in Bristol and London, and areas in which Robin was known to have lived or hung out. From this data, six key locations or ‘hotspots’ were identified – including a pub, a playing field, and a residential address – which appeared to suggest a strong connection between the works of Banksy and places frequented by Robin Gunningham.

The co-author of the report Steve Le Comber told the press: “I’d be surprised if it’s not Gunningham, even without our analysis, but it’s interesting that the analysis offers additional support for it. It rapidly became apparent that there is only one serious suspect, and everyone knows who it is.”

Another interesting point here is that Banksy’s lawyers took the unusual step of attempting to delay publication of the report, allegedly on the grounds that it amounted to an invasion of privacy. Although they managed to delay publication for a week, there was nothing they could do in the long term as geographic profiling is an entirely legal process which uses only publicly available data.

Let’s head back to The Mail on Sunday who were now on the hunt for people who knew Robin Gunningham. They managed to find an artist called Luke Egan who used to share a house with Robin in Bristol in the late 1990s, but he was pretty tight-lipped. He denied ever knowing either Robin Gunningham or Banksy, despite the fact that the electoral roll showed he had lived with Robin, and he was also known to have later shared an exhibition with Banksy.

Camilla Stacey, a curator at a Bristol Gallery, later bought the property in question in 2000 and confirmed that Robin had been a former tenant, whilst also noting that the walls of her new pad had been covered in Banksy-esque graffiti.

Finally, The Mail on Sunday tracked down Robin’s long-divorced parents and presented them each with the 2004 photograph taken in Jamaica to see if it jogged any memories of their son. The responses were peculiar. Robin’s mother Pamela revealed that she had a daughter but she did not have a son, and then went on to deny that she was Pamela Gunningham, insisting that the electoral roll must be wrong. Robin’s father Peter claimed not to recognise the man in the photograph and stated with a shrug: “I can’t help you, really.” But the Mail on Sunday felt that Peter’s tone was bordering on the playful. I’m not entirely sure how I’d react if a random stranger knocked on my door to ask if I was the father of a mysterious guy in a photograph. Depending on my mood, I suspect I’d either react with comical bafflement or just chase them down the driveway with a mop. In the case of Robin’s parents, neither of them appeared to raise an eyebrow, almost as if they had been expecting this question to be asked one day.

It does seem that Robin Gunningham is the most likely suspect of all, even if it still can’t be definitively proven. Art experts seem to be leaning towards this theory with their wallets, as a Banksy-style piece attributed to Robin Gunningham recently sold at auction for £4,000 which is a pretty high price tag for a completely unknown artist.

Of course, this could all be an elaborate web of deceit set up by Banksy himself to throw us all off the scent. And there’s another quick theory which I have to admit I find the most compelling of all…

Banksy is Legion

When the UK journalism graduate Craig Williams first drew a strong connection between Massive Attack frontman 3D and Banksy, he actually felt a bit miffed that the press had largely dismissed the bigger theory that he was proposing: Banksy is not just one artist. He’s a collective of artists, quite possibly led by 3D. Craig later complained: “I’m pretty annoyed at how this has come out as me basically saying that it’s 3D. I wanted to focus more on the idea that it’s a group of artists who share common themes, mirroring the idea suggested in Shakespeare scholarship circles — that such a large body of work was done by many hands rather than one.”

It makes sense on many levels. It’s clear that Banksy must at least have several accomplices. Some of his bigger and more ambitious pieces of work would have been impossible to carry out quickly single-handed. And the fact that he’s managed to create so many different pieces of work all around the world in relatively short periods of time makes you wonder if it’s not always the same guy – or gal – holding the spray paints and stencils.

If we were to consider the case closed on the grounds that Robin Gunningham is clearly Banksy, we would be completely disregarding the curious geographical coincidences relating to 3D, and the suggestion that Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett appears to have a financial connection with every commercial enterprise involving Banksy. Maybe Banksy’s original gang or art collective DryBreadZ Crew never actually split up, and Banksy never went solo at all, it’s just that the crew adopted a new name. Maybe the Banksy collective includes Robin Gunningham, 3D, Jamie Hewlett, Neil Buchanan, and the female artist who appeared in the documentary.

Maybe it included King Robbo before his death. And maybe it even includes former councillor Billy Gannon. Nah, scrap that last one, Billy Gannon is definitely not Banksy.

He’s got a badge to prove it. But I still reckon that the idea of Banksy being a collective rather than an individual is the most likely theory we have to go on.

The Enduring Mystery

I mentioned at the beginning of this article that it’s quite amazing how Banksy has managed to keep his identity secret for so long. It probably wouldn’t do his career much good if it was proven conclusively that he was just some guy called Rob. For starters, he could potentially be arrested for hundreds of acts of vandalism.

But I feel that another factor at play here is that most of his fans and admirers don’t actually want the mystery to be solved. They don’t want Banksy to be unmasked as a children’s TV presenter or a former public schoolboy who used to play hockey with his middle-class chums. They don’t want the legend of a heroic subversive street crusader to be peeled away, even if the evidence ever proved to be overwhelming. In a way, his fans are complicit in helping to keep the secret.

It’s better to keep the enigma and the mystique intact. With that in mind, I implore you to forget everything you’ve just read and pretend that, much like most of Banksy’s original artwork, this article does not exist.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Banksy?

Banksy is a famous street artist known for his anti-capitalist, anti-war, and anti-establishment messages. Despite his fame, his true identity remains unknown.

What is Banksy’s background?

Banksy hails from the Barton Hill district of Bristol and had a troubled youth, including expulsion from school and a short stint in prison for petty crime.

How did Banksy start his career?

Banksy began as a freehand graffiti artist but switched to stencil art to reduce the risk of getting arrested. He formed the DryBreadZ Crew in the 1990s before going solo.

What are some of Banksy’s most famous works?

Some of Banksy’s most famous works include a young girl embracing a bomb, two male police officers snogging, military helicopters adorned with pink bows, and Mona Lisa with a rocket launcher.

What is the significance of Banksy’s stencil art?

Banksy switched to stencil art to reduce the time spent painting outdoors, thereby minimizing the risk of getting caught. This method also allowed for more precise and detailed artwork.

What is the ‘shredding incident’?

The ‘shredding incident’ refers to when Banksy’s artwork ‘Girl with Balloon’ partially shredded itself during an auction at Sotheby’s in 2018, creating a new piece titled ‘Love in the Bin’.

What is the ‘Barely Legal’ exhibition?

The ‘Barely Legal’ exhibition was held in Los Angeles in 2006 and featured controversial pieces, including a portrait of Mother Teresa with the caption ‘I learnt a valuable lesson from this woman. Moisturise every day.‘

Who are some of the suspected identities of Banksy?

Some of the suspected identities of Banksy include Robin Gunningham, Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, Jamie Hewlett, Neil Buchanan, and King Robbo, although none have been definitively proven.

What is the ‘Banksy is Legion’ theory?

The ‘Banksy is Legion’ theory suggests that Banksy is not a single artist but a collective of artists, possibly led by Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, who share common themes and styles.

What is the significance of Banksy’s anonymity?

Banksy’s anonymity adds to his mystique and legend, allowing his fans to maintain the enigma and subversive appeal of his artwork. It also protects him from potential legal consequences for his illegal street art.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Who is Banksy? The Elusive Identity of Britain’s Biggest Street Artist
• Hero image source by Simon Cobb / openverse, cc0.