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"Banksy gave up spraying freehand graffiti back in the early 1990s when he discovered that stencils were more \u201Cquick, clean, crisp, and efficient,\u201D as he once told an interviewer. He didn\u2019t care that other artists in his Bristol crew considered it cheating. \u201CAs soon as I cut my first stencil I could feel the power there. The ruthlessness and efficiency of it is perfect.\u201D Banksy\u2019s language here is telling. It is precisely the kind of strict, economical approach the anonymous artist has applied to his entire career, which has taken him, if not from rough working-class roots \u2014 his street cred is widely debated \u2014 then at least from suburban Bristol malaise to international stardom. His studio-painted canvases now command upwards of $1 million, his popup exhibitions draw hundreds of thousands of visitors without any advertising, and collectors pay to carve out stone walls, bus stops, water towers, and just about any other structure on which has left his mark. This is all thanks to the mystery-machine and his tight inner circle have used to lure legions of fans. But the urge to pierce the mystery should not be what attracts readers to Will Ellsworth-Jones\u2019s book \u201CBanksy:The Man Behind the Wall,\u201D coming to the U.S. this month from St. Martin\u2019s Press. Despite the somewhat misleading subtitle, it never seeks to unmask its subject. His fans \u201Cdon\u2019t want to know\u201D his identity, Ellsworth-Jones argues, and he therefore deliberately omits the findings the 2008 Daily Mail story that published the name and photo of a man believed to be Banksy \u2014 an editorial decision that suggests the paper was right. Agreeing to protect Banksy\u2019s anonymity was also probably the only way Ellsworth-Jones could get even limited access to the artist\u2019s friends and colleagues, even though Banksy himself still never granted him an interview. \u201CIf I approached anyone for an interview the first question I was nearly always asked was: \u2018Has Banksy authorized this request?\u2019\u201D he writes. His answer again and again was \u201Cno,\u201D and lots of doors shut in his face. The author is a devoted fan of the artist's work, but also a meticulous reporter and unafraid to call Banksy out on hypocrisy. So, instead of revealing \u201Cthe man behind the wall,\u201D Ellsworth-Jones explains how the man built the wall. It\u2019s a more interesting story, it turns out, illuminating how a tagger once known as Robin Banx wove anonymity with celebrity, irony with accessibility, and street art with high art to create the global Banksy brand. It started with the idea to capitalize on an untapped demographic of young, would-be collectors who didn\u2019t visit art galleries. Banksy and his former manager Steve Lazarides reached out to them by posting pictures of the artist\u2019s street works on his website before authorities or taggers painted them over. When interest built around a work they\u2019d turn it into a print, which Lazarides might sell out of his car for as little as \u00A310. Eventually galleries and even the department store Selfridges began buying the works. But where this white-cube affirmation might be the end of most success stories, it is where Banksy\u2019s story begins. As his sales grew, Banksy and Lazarides stopped selling to art dealers, even shunning them. Instead, they regained control of distribution and marketed the works at Lazarides\u2019s new gallery and on Banksy\u2019s website, turning the release of new prints into a kind of game. They\u2019d hype the drop date and soon fans were crashing the website and camping out at the gallery overnight to buy a print. \u201CWhat Banksy and Lazarides had done together was create a market for street art where none had existed before,\u201D Ellsworth-Jones writes. Since 2002, prints from Banksy\u2019s first official edition, \u201CRude Copper,\u201D have gone from \u00A340 apiece to as high as \u00A313,000 today. Ultimately Banksy and Lazarides parted ways, and his new sales and authentication company, Pest Control, has proved even more profitable, reporting \u00A31.1 million in assets in 2010. But these days the forces of fame have started to overpower Banksy. \u201CSo far he has managed to straddle the two worlds, although his subversiveness diminishes as his prices rise,\u201D Ellsworth-Jones says. \u201C[H]e appears to have reached the awkward point where he wants to remain somehow part of that subculture while his very success makes it almost impossible for him to do so.\u201D Banksy can\u2019t determine the fate of his art once it has sold, for instance. He has had some success quashing the market for his street works by refusing to authenticate them, but there is little he can do to stop once reasonably priced works from popping up overnight on eBay, at posh secondary-market galleries, or at auction houses. Even worse, Banksy can\u2019t manipulate the way he is seen by his peers; if he was a cheater before to them, no doubt he\u2019s a sellout now. \u201CI'm not so interested in convincing people in the art world that what I do is \u2018art,\u2019\u201D he once said. \u201CI'm more bothered about convincing people in the graffiti community that what I do is really vandalism.\u201D His 2010 documentary \u201CExit Through the Gift Shop,\u201D which won him an Oscar nomination, certainly didn\u2019t help either. Working street artists tend to despise the main character, Thierry Guetta, an unsuccessful cameraman who decides to become a pop artist by throwing himself an ostentatious Hollywood exhibition. Devoting a two-hour major motion picture to the man, however mocking, made Banksy \u201Cextremely unpopular in my community\u201D he has said. But, in many ways, the film is Banksy\u2019s masterpiece, the ultimate exercise in manipulation, in which he conjures a famous artist (Mr. Brainwash) out of a nobody (Guetta), all the while maintaining his own role as both a subject and director. Banksy\u2019s remarkable ability to micromanage his surroundings is also why one is hard-pressed to find pictures of his earliest work, like the old freehand graffiti that he has since deemed \u201Ccrap.\u201D Ellsworth-Jones points out that Banksy deletes these images from websites and leaves them out of his books, handily whitewashing whatever doesn't fit the tightly controlled brand that he has built."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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