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He is the outlaw who has been dragged reluctantly, but relentlessly, ever closer to the art establishment. He is the artist who mocked museums and art galleries alike. Yet he chose to mount his first major exhibition in one of the crustiest museums imaginable – amidst the stuffed animals and the antique pianos of Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery – and made a huge success of it. When, in 2010, Time magazine selected him for its list of 100 most influential people in the world, along with the likes of Barack Obama, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga, he supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable of course) over his head. For he is an artist unique in the twenty-first century: famous but unknown. He claims he needs this anonymity to protect himself from the forces of law and order. This was true in the past, but at this stage in his career most cities would welcome a new Banksy on the wall. The argument would be how best to preserve it, not how to lock up its creator. This book does not attempt to unmask him. Tales of scuttling around his home town of Bristol trying to convince childhood friends to reveal his identity would not make for very interesting reading. More important is the fact that fans, followers and even those who are just vaguely aware he exists, don’t want to know who he is. The New Statesman critic who derides it all as ‘ostentatious anonymity’ is very much in the minority. We all enjoy the mystery of the man who has somehow managed to get himself described as ‘Robin Hood’ even though he is hardly robbing the rich to feed the poor. What this book does do, however, is to follow his upward spiral from the outlaw – just one of many – spraying the walls of Bristol in the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of pounds in the auction houses of Britain and America. The outsider who has become an insider.

OCLC: 794663420