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Banksy: The Bristol Legacy

There have been many celebratory coffee table books about street artist Banksy, but this is the first non-partisan documentation of a major solo show of Banksy’s work at Bristol’s City Museum in the summer of 2009. It gathers together a range of experts in the field to assess in forensic detail the economic, social, cultural and tourism impact of an exhibition that brought 320,000 visitors in six weeks to Bristol, but which echoed that city’s divided and radical civic history. Banksy: The Bristol Legacy raises a number of questions about the nature of subversion, the culture of anonymity, and the legacy of major cultural events in a British city. It is the first academic book to focus on issues of longevity and the long-term impact of urban art, and the first to regard Banksy as more than a polemic prankster.

Because of Banksy’s fugitive status, the research required innovative methodologies, in some cases interviewing by proxy. The essays had to be negotiated with each contributor and (to prevent threats of censure and possible injunction from the artist) each image of the show had to be negotiated and agreed with Banksy and the team who guard his identity, the Pest Control Office.

In addition to selecting and working at length with each of the contributors (and continuous dialogue with Banksy’s office), Gough wrote an extensive contextual introduction and conclusion, an essay on Banksy’s relationship to other subversive public art in Bristol and another on the iconography of the stencil. The book was extensively reviewed in The Jackdaw (July 2012); Museums Journal (September 2012); and The Times Literary Supplement (8 June 2012), discussed in hundreds of on-line social media, blogs and web sites, and was the subject of several television and radio appearances by Gough.