Banksy by Will Ellsworth-Jones

Author:Will Ellsworth-Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781845138455
Publisher: Aurum Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Ten

The Business of Banksy

In February 2008, seven months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, at a time when people were still confident enough to splash big money on good causes, New York’s rich and famous gathered together at Sotheby’s for a night of serious spending. The event, organised by Bono, Damien Hirst, Sotheby’s and the Gagosian gallery, turned out to be the biggest charity art auction ever, raising $42.5m to support AIDS programmes in Africa.

The auction had everything. As well as giving work himself, Damien Hirst hand wrote letters to each artist asking them to contribute their work. ‘I didn’t expect the result to be as good as it was, but everybody’s dug deep and given us major works rather than drawings and that. It feels like a real exhibition,’ he said. Bono was the star, wearing a black military-style jacket and sunglasses, exhorting the 700 guests to spend and spend again and, since it was Valentine’s Day, giving them an a capella version of ‘All You Need is Love’ to set them on their way.

And he led by example, spending more than $1 million on several pieces for himself. Hirst gave seven works which made a total of just over $19 million, including Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way, a pill cabinet filled with drugs for the treatment of HIV, which sold for $7,150,000.

It was a sort of Hello! love-in. John McEnroe, Martha Stewart, Queen Noor, Dennis Hopper, Michael Stipe, Helena Christensen, Liya Kebede, Russell Simmons, Ziyi Zhang and Christy Turlington (who spent $170,500 on a watercolour by Francisco Clemente – who some years earlier had painted her portrait) were a few of the headline names.

Banksy was one of the artists Hirst had asked for help and he gave three pieces. Lot 69, Ruined Landscape, one of his detourned paintings, a rural scene with ‘This is not a photo opportunity’ pasted across it, sold for $385,000, just above the estimate.

Lot 33A was his Vandalised Phone Box, a red telephone box bent to almost ninety degrees and bleeding red paint where a pickaxe had been stuck through it. The phone box had originally been placed in Soho Square but it was soon carted off by an unsympathetic Westminster Council because it did not have planning permission.

Happily Banksy was allowed to claim it back, for now it went for $605,000, double the estimated price. Three years later the buyer was revealed to be another of those millionaires that Banksy complains about: Mark Getty, grandson of J. Paul Getty. He told the Sunday Telegraph, ‘I bought it as a joke – the phone box is being killed, see?’ The joke being that there were once rumours – untrue – that his billionaire grandfather had installed a pay phone to ensure guests would not make calls at his expense and this was his – costly – way of ‘killing off the phone box rumours’. The phone box now sits in front of the library on Getty’s 2500-acre estate in the Chiltern Hills.

But it was Lot 34, Keep it Spotless, that had everyone excited.

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