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In one of his campus novels, the late David Lodge describes an academic delivering a thesis on the influence of TS Eliot on Shakespeare. Brazening out what was nothing more than an unfortunate typo, he insists that to a modern reader it is impossible to view the Bard without being reminded of Eliot’s later repurposing of certain quotations. Much the same is asserted in this book about the relationship between the canon of Western art and the subversive graffiti artist Banksy. The pseudonymous sprayer’s output regularly monkeys around with familiar works of art, from Haring and Basquiat via the Hay Wain and the Mona Lisa, right back to the cave paintings at Lascaux, which he wittily depicts being whitewashed by an indifferent municipal worker. Indeed, the fact that his preferred media is the stencil and spray can is fitting, since so much of his imagery is delineated by pre-existing shapes and ideas. It’s playful and allusive, and – if we are to believe Kelly Grovier – has single-handedly saved art history from an extinction-level event.
The obvious comparisons are to Duchamp and to Warhol – whose use of screenprint techniques and reappropriated imagery would have come to mind even if Banksy had not already turned the neon Marilyn into Kate Moss and the Campbell’s soup can into its Tesco Value alternative – and, indeed, they are made here. It’s also tempting, since the artist is said to hail from Bristol, the birthplace of trip-hop (some have suggested, without much evidence, that he might be a member of the band Massive Attack), to think in terms of sampling and remixes. But the type of visual art Banksy most closely resembles is that of the newspaper political cartoonist. Both exist principally to make gags, are inherently satirical (the House of Commons filled with chimpanzees, say, or the crucified Christ holding bags of shopping), and share a longstanding allusive tradition, reworking famous images as an easy shorthand for the viewer; each new iteration comments on what has gone before. It’s essentially a mock-heroic technique, where high art is consciously lowered to ridicule the debased state of modernity; so, for example, Banksy presses into service Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as a statement on asylum seekers at Calais, and the bar in Edward Hopper’s Night-hawks has its window smashed by a yob in Union Jack shorts.
Subtlety, then, is rarely of the essence. But Banksy’s jokey art-as-commentary is designed to be immediate. His oeuvre assumes an easy familiarity with certain cultural touchstones.
Unfortunately, this concision is not shared by Grovier, whose text is prolix, overstuffed with tricksy alliteration and unaccountably pleased with itself. One also can’t help being distracted by the insistence on spelling out the identity of everyone in the most leaden terms, such as ‘the 14th-century Italian poet Alighieri Dante’ (sic). Sadly, it is in the nature of jokes that they rarely work quite so well when ponderously explained.
A version of this article also appeared in the March 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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