Banksy has become famous for being famous, which is quite an achievement considering we are not certain who he is. Like all famous artists, he is often reduced to a cash value – making his artworks as nickable as they are memetic. The animals Banksy has been painting in unlikely London sites this summer are causing a now-familiar surge of adulation and hubbub. Yet behind his (anti)celebrity cult, Banksy is an artist whose work veers wildly in quality. At his best he’s a satirical agent provocateur with few rivals. At worst he’s vacantly sentimental or ideologically crass, often both at the same time. So which Banksys are worth making a fuss over and which deserve to be left in a skip?
20. Napalm
Banksy’s capacity to be trite about tragedy is encapsulated by this painting which adds nothing to Nick Ut’s photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc after she was burned in a napalm attack. Or rather he adds Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald in a heavy-handed bit of bombastic overkill.
19. Girl with Balloon
One of Banksy’s best-known but emptiest artworks, this mural that first appeared on London’s South Bank in 2002 is the 21st century answer to John Everett Millais’ gooey Victorian painting Bubbles, which was used as an advert for Pear’s Soap. The heart-shaped balloon floats away. The little girl is sad.
18. London animals
The series of animal murals that have taken London by storm this month are proof Banksy’s celebrity has totally outstripped his talent. The vandalism, the thefts, the anticipation – it’s like a programmed Pavlovian response, yet there are no fresh perceptions of nature in these bland images.
17. Love Is in the Air
A masked protester, squaring up to an oppressor we can’t see, throws … a bunch of flowers! This is a picture absurdly pleased with its own cleverness. The street fighter looks angry but hurls love – a glib visual slogan that says nothing about actual conflict. Worse, the aggression of the figure clumsily undermines the pacifist intent.
16. Show Me the Monet
If Monet was around now, right, his waterlily pond would be heaving with rubbish, yeah? And that’s how Banksy has painted it. A horrible matted version of a Monet painting with shopping trolleys and a traffic cone in the water. Is it satirising water pollution or mocking Monet for being a soppy French toff? Either way it’s kind of stupid.
15. Dismaland
You had to not be there to appreciate Banksy’s deliberately awful seaside fun fair. As a concept it was instantly hilarious and looked perversely good fun on TV or online. In person, it was genuinely dispiriting with its extremely bad art including a heartless, unfunny tableau of Cinderella’s coach crash.
14. Ronald McDonald Shoeshine
This foray into performance art by Banksy got them agog in New York. A live actor plays a barefoot 1900s shoeshine boy, giving a shiny colossal statue of Ronald a shine. The target is too obvious for it to be genuinely unsettling or funny. A quite good idea killed by cliche.
13. Migrant Child
Is Banksy’s painting of a child in a lifejacket holding up a flare just above a Venice canal a powerful comment on the refugee crisis – or just another piece of tourist pollution in the Serenissima? Venice, that fragile medieval wonder of the world, surely doesn’t really need enhancing by Banksy.
12. Napoleon Crossing the Alps
Banksy shows off his artistic skills, usually quite well hidden, in this mural in Paris. He does a competent rendering of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps, putting real detail into Bonaparte’s rearing horse and his swathing robe. Even Banksy, it seems, can’t resist the cultural spell of Paris.
11. Tree
Banksy allowed himself to splash out into abstract art in this recent work in London. The cloud of splodged green paint is quite lovely. So is its witty siting behind a real, brutally cut back and leafless tree.
10. Ukraine murals
Banksy’s art appeared on bombed out buildings and other war-battered sites in Ukraine in 2022 as an act of solidarity with the attacked nation. Ukraine appreciated the mystery artist’s gesture and even put his murals on to postage stamps. In the most pithy, a child defeats a Putinesque man at judo.
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9. Season’s Greetings
Banksy has a sentimental streak a mile wide and Christmas brings out the best in him. This mural that miraculously appeared in Port Talbot one winter’s night showed a child greeting what looked like snow, but turned out to be ashes from a fire in a rubbish bin.
8. Rats
You can’t beat a rat as a cartoon image of an underclass of mordant anarchists, rising from the gutters to bite authority. Banksy’s rats are not just a trademark but one of his most succinct and effective creations, with their power to materialise overnight in an inspired London plague spreading from Shoreditch into the City.
7. Kissing Coppers
Banksy has little in common with earlier street artists like Haring or Basquiat but this early classic does have a recognisable relationship with a famous image of Communist leaders kissing, painted on the Berlin Wall. Banksy translates that image of authority queered to Britain in this simple, funny work.
6. Sweep It Under the Carpet
This mural of a worker cleaning away what no one wants to see gained a lot from its location when Banksy stencilled it on the wall of London’s White Cube gallery. In that art world context, this woman is doing her low paid job, cleaning up after a private view. The outsider artist hits the art insiders with glee.
5. God Bless Birmingham
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Christmas at Banksy’s house must be great – he really seems to believe in the season of goodwill. This lovely bit of winter magic in Birmingham conjured up Santa’s reindeer to apparently pull aloft a bench used by homeless people. It’s one of his nimblest juxtapositions of painting and real life, done with compassion.
4. Migrant Bird
Usually when a Banksy appears, anywhere from Kyiv to New York, there is inordinate rejoicing as locals flock to see it and calculate the added tourist income. Not so in Clacton-on-Sea, where this painting of a colourful migrant African bird being abused by dowdy local species was implausibly accused of racism – a response that proved the satire hurt.
3. Love Is in the Bin
As Banksy’s prices went up, he took the opportunity to aim a brilliant fart at the art market and its conversion of culture into cash. Everything went well at a 2018 Sotheby’s auction of Girl With Balloon until the moment it sold for £1,042,000. Then an internal mechanism shredded it to bits. But the market always wins: the self-destroyed artwork has since been sold for £18,582,000.
2. Well Hung Lover
This early work in Bristol has the raw vulgarity and joyful filth of a modern Hogarth. A naked man hangs from a window out of which his lover’s besuited husband is looking for him. It only takes a second to get the joke yet, because it’s painted with so much verve, you can look at it a lot longer and repeatedly.
1. Stormzy’s stab-proof vest
When Stormzy headlined at Glastonbury in 2019 in a stab-proof vest created by Banksy, it raised the grime artist’s game to make him one of Britain’s long line of flagbearing pop artists. Like an apocalyptic Peter Blake, Banksy clad Stormzy in a classic Banksy palette. This near-monochrome Union flag is a flag that protects against and is defiant of far right hatred.