Who is Banksy?

Madrid. 13 July 2018. The Loop stage at Mad Cool Festival. Massive Attack's set is running late… and later. Everyone's looking at everyone else fearing the worst. The British band's most die-hard fans have already been warned: they're quite capable of cancelling a gig over the tiniest technical detail. Then someone in the front rows shouts something that takes the edge off: “They'll come on as soon as they finish the graffiti”. Because for years now, the figure of Banksy has always been linked to Massive Attack, and more specifically to their musical brain Robert del Naja.

Is Robert del Naja Banksy? A few years ago, several British publications put together reports tracing the close relationship between the most famous graffiti artist in history and the famous Bristol group. To start with, where they come from. Banksy began his street work in Bristol, the port city in the southwest of England. In the late 80s a musical revolution took shape there, led by bands like Portishead and Massive Attack themselves, who mixed electronica with hip hop, funk and rock and ended up under a label known as trip hop that soon proved too small for them.

At the same time, Bristol was turning into a cutting-edge hub for all sorts of art forms, to the point of rivalling London. That's the context in which Banksy starts working, and his first pieces date from the early 90s… exactly when Massive Attack began to lead the British electronic scene.

It was the journalist Craig Williams who put together the most thorough report linking Banksy to Robert del Naja, based on a fairly plausible theory: the overlap between Massive Attack's tours and the appearance of various Banksy graffiti around the world.

But it was in 2017 that Banksy's identity was laid bare… thanks to a slip, intentional?, by Goldie, a close friend of Robert del Naja. In an interview the conversation turned to the graffiti artist and Goldie let himself go: “write something on a T-shirt, put 'Banksy' on it and there you go… We could sell it right now. No disrespect to Robert, I think he's a brilliant artist. I think he's turned the art world upside down”. They say that after saying the name “Robert”, Goldie went quiet for a few seconds, as if taking mental stock of the consequences of his blunder. Or was the whole thing a joke cooked up between friends?

We're all Banksy

Because if anyone has fuelled the theory that Banksy is Robert del Naja, it's the musician himself, who has always been happy to play along. “Banksy is a mate and yeah, he's been to a lot of our shows, so I think it's all been a matter of logistics and coincidence, but that's all it is”. And he'd wrap up questions about the graffiti artist's true identity with a bit of irony: “We're all Banksy”.

And in a way Robert is right. One of the many innovations Banksy has brought to 21st century art has to do precisely with authorship. Quite a few analysts reckon that Banksy is an artistic collective working anonymously under that name. The traditional cult of personality in art history is another of the things Banksy is trying to blow up.

After all, does it really matter who Banksy is? Or is what matters the message and the impact of the artworks? Exactly: we're all Banksy.