Banksy, the UK’s best-known street artist, might be getting too famous for the good of his creations. Their appearance provokes some odd reactions. Of the nine animal paintings he made across London over consecutive days in the past weeks, one — a howling wolf, painted on an old satellite dish — has been stolen, while another, a rhinoceros appearing to mount an abandoned car, has been tagged by another graffiti writer, and the car itself has vanished. A shoal of piranhas stencilled on to a police sentry box in the City has been moved elsewhere for safety. Perhaps only the image at the entrance to London Zoo, showing a gorilla lifting an edge of the fencing to release a sea lion and some birds, is destined for a long life.
The animals series has puzzled seasoned Banksy-watchers, as it seems to have none of the political edge we have come to expect. Although he has raised street art to a level of commercial success never seen before, with works fetching many millions in the salerooms, Banksy still uses his art to needle establishment norms. He also clings to graffiti’s time-honoured night-time guerrilla tactics, pulling off seamlessly planned surprise raids equally well in bustling cities or bleak war zones. A fine example was his 2022 venture into Ukraine, where his signature stencilled artworks suddenly appeared on ruins or military equipment in the centre of Kyiv and in small villages alike.
Secrecy about his identity has long been part of the Banksy mystique. For three decades, those who work with him have upheld their omerta of silence, despite lures from an avid press. Gradually, however, details have seeped out, and we know — or we think we know (the artist has never actually confirmed this) — that he was born Robin Gunningham, in Bristol, in 1973, to a middle-class family; he attended a private school, leaving at the age of 16.