“The art world is the biggest joke going,” according to Banksy

Banksy Was Here
The invisible man of graffiti art.

by Lauren Collins

The British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference
in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He
has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist
environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978,
or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate. The son of a butcher and a
housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s
skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting
exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. For a while
now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch, then in Hoxton.
Joel Unangst, who had the nearly unprecedented experience of meeting
Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse
from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a
T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the
T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much
already, that they are covered with smudges of white paint.