14 DAY TRIAL // Banksy’s work first started getting international media attention in 1992 and, since then, though he’s been selling his pieces for huge amounts and is probably a millionaire by now, no one has been able to establish his identity or, for that matter, get a clear photo of him.
A huge fan of his work might have just solved the mystery for us, getting a photo of a man he’s convinced is Banksy, in New York, Manhattan, when his art van broke down.
The artist is now on a one-month residency in NYC and one of his pieces consists of a van whose back side is painted with a fairytale forest, complete with waterfalls and rainbows, which he moves around town, to locations he announces beforehand on his website.
This is how his fan was able to track and, unfortunately for Banksy, snap his photo when he got out of the van to fix the flat battery, the Mirror reports. It also has a photo of the alleged artist.
The fan tells the Mirror that he simply walked up to him and asked him, “Are you Banksy?,” to which “Banksy” smiled and then replied, “No man, I’m a truck driver.”
The fan explains that there was something in the way he said that, as well as the smile, that made him think he was actually Banksy.
Speaking of the artist, he just gave another rare interview, this time by e-mail, to the Village Voice, to explain why he picked New York as the place to exhibit new work and how that’s coming along.
Banksy is somewhat disappointed that some of the empty lots he chose for his work (both because of their position and because they offered plenty of places to hide) have already been built on, but he’s not about to let that ruin his plans.
“The plan is to live here, react to things, see the sights – and paint on them. Some of it will be pretty elaborate, and some will just be a scrawl on a toilet wall,” he says.
“There is absolutely no reason for doing this show at all. I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There's no gallery show or book or film. It's pointless. Which hopefully means something,” Banksy adds.