[Fern_Blossom]

I still think Banksy is not a real "person". It's just a team of marketers who started a prank or dare and it turned into this internationally beloved money printing scam. Because, you know, a thumbs up and spray painting a wall equals feeding a poor kid a bowl of rice everyday. "We're so anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism, now give us money for this art".

[matthewaveryusa]

Before Banksy became incredibly popular he made a name for himself in the graf scene. I remember Banksy from the mid 2000s and he was just another cool artist doing interesting things with stencils. For me he was in the same category as France's space invaders, or the guys in Spain (gemeos?) making giant paintings of odd-looking humans. Sometime in the early 2010s Banksy ramped up publicity stunts, and at that point I think Banksy became a collective of artists. Long story short I think Banksy was a person, but probably not anymore.

[acjohnson55]

Why do you think Banksy is not an individual anymore? Many top artists run workshops, in which other people physically fabricate their works. Take Jeff Koons, for example. But few would claim that Jeff Koons is no longer an individual.

[AnotherGoodName]

I mean even if the art is one person the numerous legally registered companies such as, BANKSY LIMITED, THE ART OF BANKSY LONDON LIMITED, etc. are corporations with directors that you can easily look up. The listed directors almost certainly aren't Banksy.

Banksy is literally a company with marketing, accounts, PR, and management. They are constantly looking for the next viral opportunity and they are big on branding.

[tartoran]

Yeah, it’s quite sad, it’s just another business milking attention, controversy and art with an f.

[AnotherGoodName]

For what it's worth i don't even mind that Banksy is literally a corporation. I just wish we were all honest about that. If there's some aspiring artist out there that wants to be the next Banksy our advice should be

"Ok go and register a new company. You'll also need some inner city office space, a management team, marketing and PR. As for the art? Let the data analysts take a look at opportunities to get the most views."

[spywaregorilla]

Could banksy be multiple people? Probably not but sure its possible.

It's way off the mark to say he's just "spray painting a wall" though.

[mmarq]

> I still think Banksy is not a real "person". It's just a team

I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true

> of marketers who started a prank or dare and it turned into this internationally beloved money printing scam.

He/she/they do produce art, so it’s definitely not a scam.

> Because, you know, a thumbs up and spray painting a wall equals feeding a poor kid a bowl of rice everyday. "We're so anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism, now give us money for this art".

I can criticise whatever I want however I want, let it be a pamphlet or a painting, without having to give money to the poor or feeding random children.

[DonHopkins]

Speaking of artists who are suspected of being a collective team, the identity and back story of "Netochka Nezvanova" aka "integer" aka "antiorp" was finally revealed.

Netochka Nezvanova is a name of a character from a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, and translates as "nameless nobody".

Her real name is Rebekah Wilson, and she was teamed up with another women who she never met in person, but she kind of fell in love with, but who actually turned out to be a man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(author)

>Netochka Nezvanova has been described by cultural critics as "an elusive online identity" and "a collective international project". In 2020, art critic Amber Husain describes NN as an "avatar of avant-garde internet performance" that "became as known for her abstract and usable software artworks as she did for aggressive displays of anonymous cyber-domination".

portrait #02 Rebekah Wilson aka Netochka Nezvanova

https://archiv.ima.or.at/imafiction/video-portrait-02-rebeka...

She and her work (like NATO.0+55+3d) been discussed on Hacker News before:

NATO.0+55+3d:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d

Netochka Nezvanova (usemod.com):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774594

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/NetochkaNezvanova

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22352276

>Bravo! If you enjoyed that anti-Max performance art trolling, but thought it wasn't spectacularly hyperbolic and sociopathic enough, I recommend looking up some of the classic flames on the nettime mailing list by Netochka Nezvanova aka "NN" aka "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp"!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16753758

>Nato.0+55+3d (released in 1999) was an amazing but notorious extension for Max that enabled live programming of real time video manipulation, networking and display.

https://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/

>The most feared woman on the Internet

>Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and online troublemaker. But is she for real?

>[...] Netochka's medium is the online mailing list. Posting as "antiorp" and, more recently, "integer," she capriciously takes over technical and artistic discussions in forums such as the European Net arts list Syndicate, says Steev Hise, a Bay Area electronic artist. "Nobody really knows how many real people are involved with this," he says.

>[...] "As a community destroyer, she's fantastic," says Bernstein, the Brooklyn artist. "She's perhaps one of the Internet's first professional demolition experts. She's a real talent."

>[...] Bernstein says his own license for the NATO.0+55 software was revoked after he critiqued the software publicly in a paper published on his Web site. "Netochka, whoever she and they are, has done a brilliant marketing job by making the whole thing this exclusive little mysterious club."

>[...] Ask Netochka a question about herself, and the answers appear illusory, like water running through your fingers. "Is Netochka a figment of the Net's collective imagination?" meets with this enigmatic reply: "A ty budesh chitat? There is only 01 of me."

>[...] Netochka refuses to be pinned down. As she puts it, in e-mail: "Being ambiguous, we are deemed confused, rather than praised for the complexity of the order in our minds."