Mystery has shrouded the entire career of the street artist Banksy, but a new BBC podcast and Radio 4 series may just have revealed something about him: his voice.
The Banksy Story features a 2005 recording that has only ever been broadcast in the US, and which, according to the show, is “a bit of a find”. The clip is from the All Things Considered news show on the NPR (National Public Radio) station, which was broadcast on 24 March – a few days after the artist exhibited his own work in the Met, AKA New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“We assume that you are who you say you are, but how can we be sure?” asks the host, to which the person claiming to be Banksy retorts: “Oh, you have no guarantee of that at all.”
The three-minute interview features the supposed voice of the artist claiming to see himself as a “painter and decorator”, who explains his penchant for gluing his artworks to the walls of institutions such as the Louvre because: “You don’t want to get stuck in the same line of work your whole life long, do you?”
He claims that his aim with exhibiting his work in the Met was for it to stay on display for 42 days, based on a supposed incident in which he believes they once accidentally hung a work by Henri Matisse upside down for that length of time. Comparing his work to Matisse is clearly not an issue for the interviewee.
“I mean, I thought some of them were quite good, that’s why I thought: put them in a gallery,” he says. “Otherwise they’d just stay at home and no one would see them. If you wait for other people to latch on to what you’re doing, you’d be waiting for ever. You might as well cut out the middle man and just go stick it in yourself.”
Given that we are now decades into celebrating Banksy’s work, the question of his art’s legality is now almost overlooked. But this was clearly not the case in 2005, judging by the outro to the interview. “But what you’re doing is illegal!” challenges the host. “That’s what makes it good fun,” he retorts.
“You can’t make an omelette [without breaking some eggs], can you? But it’s not in my interests to get arrested very often. It’s all about keeping going as long as you can. So, yeah, you have to think about these things. That’s the thing: mindless vandalism takes a lot more thought than most people would imagine.”
While it’s not certain that the interviewee is Banksy, the host of the BBC show certainly sounds excited. “Is this Banksy’s actual, actual voice?” he asks. “I don’t know … but if it is him, it’s the first time we’ve ever heard him!”
The Banksy Story is available now on BBC Radio 4.
