What’s a Banksy Museum Without Banksy?

Max Lakin

NEW YORK: To enter the Banksy Museum, which opened this month above a Bank of America on the lower lip of SoHo, a visitor must wade through the thicket of vendors crowding Canal Street with bootleg Apple products and almost-convincing Prada handbags splayed out on blankets.

It’s a fitting approach. The Banksy Museum does not own or display any actual Banksys but rather 167 decent-enough reproductions of them, life-size murals and paintings on panels treated to look like exterior walls that stretch through an exhibition space, designed to resemble the street.

That these replicas of Banksy’s oeuvre since the late 1990s are more or less faithful to their source material has less to do with the competence of the anonymous artists who executed them than it does with the simplicity of Banksy’s aesthetic: photo-derived stencil work, more about social commentary than technical proficiency.

A Banksy work does not astound with technique or formal innovation, nor is it meant to. Designed to be quickly made and quicker understood, they rely on easy visual gags that don’t always amount to much, all punchline and no windup (a man walking a Keith Haring dog; riot police and protesters having a pillow fight; a boy catching snow on his tongue that’s actually ash from a dumpster fire). His early political satire, like Winston Churchill with a mohawk and teddy bears lobbing Molotov cocktails, had all the profundity of a dorm room poster, a shallow populism that explains his trajectory — populism being a sure route toward cultural phenomenon.

The world’s most famous anonymous street artist, Banksy has traveled that route since the mid-2000s, inspiring a singular devotion. The appearance of a new work is heralded as a cultural event, its removal often met with protests. Few other artists are treated as prophet and savior, and fewer still who insist on a complete allergy to public life.

The Banksy Museum embodies these contradictions, probably inadvertently: unauthorized, it’s an act of both admiration and exploitation. It’s also an interesting thought experiment: Can you have a museum with only reproductions? Does street art still function when removed from the street? Can an artist be anti-establishment while still fetching millions of dollars at auction?

The Banksy Museum seems to not share these potential hypocrisies. It presents an unequivocal

hagiography of Banksy as an art world Robin Hood, unimpeachable in his worldview and incorruptible in his manner of expression. The Banksy Museum is of course not a museum in the strict sense of the word, or even the loose one (it employs no curatorial staff, nor does it conserve or collect any artwork).

It is a museum more in the way the Museum of Ice Cream uses the concept: a ticketed, immersive experience where the experience in which you are being immersed is vague. This experience costs $30 for adult entry (children’s tickets are $21), in line with what the Met charges non-New Yorkers, but at least at the Met the Matisses are real.

There is something perverse in paying to experience an ersatz street to look at artificial graffiti, as if the real version wasn’t available outside for free. Between the piped-in soundtrack of police sirens and the hazard markings cordoning each work as if they were crime scenes, the space has the flavor of the lifesize warehouse replica in Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” by way of a laser tag arena in a suburban strip mall.

Does New York need a Banksy Museum? The artist has little to do with the city’s rich history of graffiti and style writing. He made a well-publicized visit here in 2013 when he created a few dozen pieces that alluded limply to the city (a rat wearing a Yankees cap; the line “This is my New York accent” rendered in a hazy wildstyle approximation) and again in 2018, and then seemed to stop thinking about the place.

(One of the only known remaining artworks from the 2013 visit is near Zabar’s, protected by plexiglass.) And for the most part, New York graffitists don’t seem to think about Banksy much either, outside an amusing and certainly one-sided campaign by the tagger Hektad, who has been spraying and pasting forms of “Hektad vs Banksy” around the city for the last 10 years.

In fact, the Banksy Museum is simply the latest of many such Banksy Museums that the Belgian film director and producer Hazis Vardar has opened around the world since his first effort in Paris, in 2019; four are currently open. And Vardar’s museums are just a part of the Banksy cottage-industry. Other unauthorized exhibitions operate around the world; street vendors can reliably be found hawking small imitations.

Banksy’s own philosophy invites such entrepreneurship. “Copyright is for losers,” the artist has mused.

And more than lax copyright restrictions, these exhibitions take advantage of a slavering cult of personality, the kind that Banksy himself seems to counsel against, fed by the careful control of his persona and mystique.

The museum devotes a sizable section to Banksy’s ostensible disdain for the art world. “Commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist,” he told The Village Voice in a rare 2013 interview. It’s a position complicated by his production of sellable objects and multimillion dollar auction prices, the most famous of which is the 2018 spectacle at Sotheby’s, when “Girl With Balloon” partly self-destructed after selling for $1.4 million, a stunt meant to satirize the market’s frothing speculative behavior but paradoxically only juiced its value. Sotheby’s resold it in 2021 for $25.4 million. It’s hard to have it both ways.

Banksy’s ideas are utterly correct. His anti-establishment paranoid worldview has mostly been borne out: Politicians are largely craven and the wealthy often get away with fleecing the working class, and the art world is largely divorced from reality. But his righteousness is reductive  Children: good. Adults: bad.

Government: evil. Money: stupid.

In many ways this endeavor proves his point: Art has become inseparable from commerce. But the Banksy Museum ultimately fails not because of the tourist admission pricing but because any power Bansky’s art possesses derives from the street. “The Banksy Museum” is the kind of thing Banksy himself might produce to mock the market’s fetishization of street art: a simulacrum of the street that sanitizes its life and danger and potential  a totally unnatural, airless tomb. Its most interesting effect may be the way in which it illustrates the limits of control.

Banksy’s 2010 film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” purports to tell the story of Thierry Guetta’s rise from vintage clothier in Los Angeles to the inane street art impresario Mr. Brainwash, possibly a Banksy invention, or his own nightmare. It’s a cautionary tale, a criticism of the commodification of street art, once outside the mainstream and now wholly a part of it. Naturally, of course, the Banksy Museum spits you out through a gift shop, the words “exit through the gift shop” stenciled on the floor as a wayfinding gag, winking as it misses the joke.