Banksy’s career has long been narrated as a detective story. His anonymity has created a mythology so embedded in his reputation that it often eclipses the work itself. National treasure, urban folk hero, or cynical sell-out—he is cast in roles that rarely sit still. This new illustrated volume by Paul Gough refuses to chase the mystery of identity. Instead, it looks directly at the work, parsing it as the practice of an artist, cultural commentator, and strategist of disruption.
Structured thematically, the book dissects Banksy’s career across multiple media: stenciller, painter, curator, filmmaker. Each chapter situates the images not as isolated provocations but as part of larger social and political conversations. The analysis is grounded in the mechanics of his craft—how stencils sharpen a message, how a misplaced caption turns parody into critique, how an appropriated oil painting destabilises the polite certainties of art history.
The narrative pauses on pivotal episodes that have defined his reputation. There is the infamous Barely Legal show in Los Angeles in 2006, with its live elephant painted head to foot in pink wallpaper pattern. The guerrilla “donations” to the Louvre, the Met, Tate Britain, and the British Museum in 2004–5 recast venerated collections with illicit interventions. The large-scale Bristol Museum takeover of 2009, where Banksy reframed a civic institution as a theatre of absurdity. Later, Dismaland in 2015, a dystopian theme park in Weston-super-Mare, remains one of the most audacious collective exhibitions staged in Britain this century. And of course, the auction room stunt of 2018, when Girl with Balloon began to shred itself seconds after the hammer fell at Sotheby’s, instantly rewriting the value and meaning of the work.
Interspersed with these grand gestures is a slower reading of the details. The book pays close attention to the visual grammar of Banksy’s stencils, his deft subversion of found canvases, and his manipulation of typography. These smaller acts are presented not as mere jokes but as a sustained critique of authority, taste, and the commodification of rebellion.
What emerges is less a biography than a cultural study. The book insists on reading Banksy within the political pressures of his time: the wars of the early 2000s, the surveillance state, and the contradictions of the art market. It recognises both his complicity and his resistance. By drawing attention away from the ‘who’ and onto the ‘what’, this volume restores focus to the images themselves—their humour, their anger, their uneasy beauty.