Editorial: Named ... and a shame as anonymous artist unmasked

Mark Dawson, editor of Wanganui Chronicle

There's some probably sound advice that says never actually meet your heroes face-to-face because they will most likely disappoint in the flesh.

A corollary of that might be never let your anonymous heroes be unmasked ... because the mystique is gone.

So it was with a mixture of interest and disappointment that I read yesterday's revelation from the UK Daily Mail that they had identified — and put a name to — the legendary street artist hitherto known only as Banksy.

For more than 20 years this guerrilla art activist has daubed his work on walls and buildings around the world, and never been caught.

He has helped elevate graffitti — once a criminal offence — into high art worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the political and social comment implicit in his work has provoked a response wherever it has appeared.

Starting with a large mural on a former solicitors' office in Bristol, depicting a teddy bear lobbing a Molotov cocktail at three riot police, Banksy has divided opinion, and there will be those who do not regard him as the greatest artist of the past three decades.

The highlights — done under the cover of darkness and then, stunningly, there as the sun rises — are many.

And then there are the extras — the alleged fake documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop; the series of "events" in New York in 2013 that had mayor Michael Bloomberg calling him a vandal and the New York police searching the streets for him; the miserable "bemusement park" Dismaland that lampooned Disneyland et al.

When a touring exhibition of his work was showing in Tauranga a year ago, a graffitti-ed John Key being beamed up into a flying saucer appeared on a wall there the day after the prime minister announced his shock resignation.

Was it Banksy? The mystery was always part of the appeal.

Now he has been named and famed. He is a just a real person after all. It won't be quite the same.