A new audio series has unearthed an old interview with someone claiming to be Banksy, giving a voice to someone whose identity otherwise remains a mystery.
The three-minute interview was shared by the Banksy story, a new 10-part podcast about the artist launched today on the BBC. It originally aired on NPR’s All Things Considered radio show in March 2005, shortly after the artist surreptitiously installed his work in four of New York’s top museums, namely the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Natural History.
“Is this Banksy’s real voice?” the podcast host wondered, James Peak, as he prepared the ground before archival recording began. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a buddy of his. Maybe it’s deliberate misdirection. Maybe it’s him.”
“If it’s him, it’s the first time we’ve heard of it.”
NPR host Michele Norris began with a similar question in her 2005 interview. “We assume you are who you say you are, but how can we be sure?” she says.
“Oh, you have no guarantee of that,” the interviewee nonchalantly replied in a thick British accent.
Most of the artist’s subsequent responses in the interview are equally ironic and concise. When Norris asked him if he considered himself “an artist, a bandit, [or] a prankster”, he just said: “Painter and decorator”. When asked how he had hung his work in all four museums without anyone noticing, he quoted another master of deception, Harry Houdini: “He has great advice for upcoming artists, I would say.”
Norris followed up with the same question, how the supposed Banksy offered some insight into how he pulled off the stunt.
“I think it’s kind of a testament to the mindset most people are in when they’re in a museum,” he said. “Most people let the world pass them by. They don’t pay much attention to most things, not even, apparently, to people with big beards holding up artwork and sticking it up.
“I thought some of them were pretty good. That’s why I thought of, you know, putting them in a gallery. Otherwise, they would sit at home and no one would see them, right? continues the artist, before giving what sounded like real advice: “If you wait for people to cling to what you do, you will wait forever. You might as well cut off the middle man and go and stick to yourself.
“But what you are doing is illegal,” Norris replied.
“That’s what makes it so much fun,” the man said.
In his audio series, Peak, who identifies not as a journalist but as a “Banksy superfan”, traces the artist’s career from his origins to the present day. At the heart of the podcast is a series of interviews with a gallerist named Steph Warren, who claims to have worked closely with Banksy in the early 2000s.
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