What if you wake up with a banksy on your wall

Sam was lying in bed one morning when her tenant in a house she owned in Margate sent her a photo of a piece of graffiti that appeared on the wall outside.

Surprisingly, it looked like a banksy. This would perhaps be the new most interesting illustration of the graffiti artist in recent years, the Valentine’s Day mascara (photo above), which was revealed in Margate on Valentine’s Day, 2023.

Bamboozled, Sam Googled: What do you do when you wake up with a banksy on your wall?

“What did Google said about it?” I asked him.

“Nothing! And I said to myself, I need to contact the advice, I need to find an art gallery that can advise me.”

Sam called Julian Usher at the Red Eight gallery. Julian’s team, aware that the New Banksy is immediate for street cleaners, weather, artists from Graffitis Rivaux and other art merchants, promised that he would be in Margate in the hour: “We knew that we should covered the play,” said Julian.

And there was another reason why Julian arrived at Margate Double-Quit: if Banksy chooses your wall for one of his drawings, you could be seriously in money.

For the second season of my BBC Radio 4 Podcast the Banksy StoryWalks when Banksy comes to town, I followed the very different fate of two sets of owners who wake up one day to find a banksy on their wall. The season shows how important its graffiti become for a local community – and why people disagree with if with vehement of what should happen after its discovery.

Sam has become the guardian of the Valentine’s Day mascara, who talks about the theme of domestic violence, of which incidents generally increase each Valentine’s Day. It’s a bit of complicated work. A Peppy housewife from the 1950s with the black eye has blown up her partner. A real saucepan with red spots is at his feet, and her painted legs are upset in the real fridge-freezer that Banksy left by the wall. A broken plastic chair testifies to the fight they had.

Later in the day, it appeared, waste collectors arrived in the spirit of the refrigerator-freezer. This precipitated a free for everyone, the public helping the remains. It was chaos.

A media melee, a local advice on foot badly, millions of world spectators. Exactly, we suspect, what Banksy wanted.

And this time, just for laughter, he left the oil painter Peter Brown, ordered to capture the scenes he would miss. I spoke to Pete “The Street” Brown for my series. “All the reason I was employed was that Banksy wondered what was art,” said Pete. “Is it graffiti? Or does it concern the reaction thereafter, and what happens to it?”

Luckily, Pete was captured on video when the Banksy team put the final touch to the Valentine’s Day mascara – a video that Banksy’s story managed to obtain. We can see that one of Banksy’s teams left a local child to play with his drone.

“They are putting a big piece on a wall and yet they take the time to teach a child how to pilot a drone,” explains Steph Warren, who worked with Banksy and who appeared in my first series – on the climb and climb of the artist. “Very soft!”

Alongside Sam, I followed the story of Gert and Gary. They, like Sam, did not want me to use their surname. A 30 -foot high seagull appeared one morning on the wall of their purchase in Lowestoft in Suffolk. The bird had to be massive for Banksy’s ambitious visual gag to work. The artist had pushed large bands of yellow insulation in a jump that now looked like a fast food container that Seagull plunged to steal fries.

Banksy had chosen his wall well. Visitors arriving by train were entitled to this spiritual meditation on the scourge of British seaside cities, shares with shares, warning and celebration. The Lowestoft Seagull was part of Banksy’s great British stay, its post-comfortable locking campaign to encourage us all about the prospect of summer vacation in the United Kingdom.

But Gert was not at all hung. “It’s not a seagull, it’s an albatross!” She joked when I went to the interviewer.

“How did you know it was a Banksy?” I asked.

“There were scaffolding erected on the side of the house. I tried to know if it was a particular scaffolding company, but there was no phone number,” said Gert. “On Monday morning, the rental agency informed me that I could have a banksy. At that time, the scaffolding had left and this seagull appeared.”

This corresponds to what we know of the Modus Operandi of Banksy. He claims to hide at sight is the best way to stay invisible. “If you are asked about your legitimacy,” he wrote in his book Wall & Piece, “simply complains about the hourly rate.”

It’s a good gag. But how fun is it for people on the other side of its spraying?

I found that with good skill skills, a bank owner could see their broken bank balance, but it is not an easy process.

As Gert explains, exasperated: “Lowestoft people said it belongs to Lowestoft … But no one has come to say:” We will help you protect him “. He does not belong to the person who films him, nor to the person who took photos with his children. The problem is mine!”

Gert had to face the people who put their children in the jump for photo opportunities, the advice trying to invoice it for the perspex screens and the threat of a preservation prescription which could have cost it £ 40,000 per year.

And the two stories I followed ended up having completely different results.

The two works were removed from the houses on which they were painted – a complex and costly operation which uses specialized equipment – so that they can be sold. But while Margate’s Banksy is now about to sell for more than 1 million pounds sterling, with a large -scale piece that goes to a charity of domestic violence, and with the remaining part in the city in the predictable future, the Banksy Up The Coast in Lowestoft languishes in a climate warehouse, costing its owners per month.

He cost Gert and his partner Gary about £ 450,000 so far to preserve the room and although there are sniff buyers, no one has yet bought it. Speaking of the situation, Gary said to me: “I’m so angry with what’s going on.”

Not everyone approves people who try to sell the Street Art of Banksy.

Steph Warren – who played in the first series in Banksy’s history as the only person to work for Banksy without signing their non -divulgation agreement – suggests that worried owners should simply “take care of five liters of white emulsion and paint it”.

Owner of the Street-Art Stelladore gallery in St Leonards, Warren is a purist, who believes that art made for the street should stay there, whatever its value. “With Banksy, where he puts art is fundamental,” she said. “Remove the work of the precise place in the streets he put it, and the work instantly loses his power. The context is everything.”

But Banksy raised graffiti in a new form of art, now monetized – Street Art. Banksy’s signed prints can sell for six -digit sums. Graffiti, or street art, have not only reached age, it is now a class of assets. Given this, how can an owner feel good about cleaning a banksy without having the impression of having broken a ming vase?

One thing I know with certainty: if you wake up with a banksy on your wall, you will have to make a series of smart decisions to get out unscathed. As Sam says, after two years of treatment of the Banksy circus, “going back to normal life will now be terribly boring”.