Banksy has been unmasked (again). But does this major Reuters investigation actually tell us something new? | Banksy

Hi Kelly, everyone is talking about Banksy (again) – what’s he done this time?

Hi Nick. So a really long (8,000-word) investigation by Reuters claims it has discovered the elusive street artist’s true identity, which backs up claims made by the Mail on Sunday British tabloid almost two decades ago that he is a 52-year-old Bristol-born man called Robin Gunningham, now going by the name of David Jones.

Wait … didn’t we already know that? Or was it supposed to be the guy from Massive Attack?

Sort of. Previous reports suggested that Robert Del Naja, the co-founder of Massive Attack – a pioneer in trip-hop, which is a music genre that also has its roots in Bristol – was Banksy. Now it seems that Naja is Gunningham’s secret partner/enabler/scout/gatekeeper.

Gotcha. So what did Reuters uncover in the way of evidence? Is there a smoking gun? Or a rat (ahem) in the ranks?

No rat, just a rat-faced Banksy scaling a Manhattan brownstone to deface a Marc Jacobs poster back in 2000. This wasn’t a piece of expertly stencilled political art, it was a clumsy attempt to paint “goofy buck teeth” on the implausibly perfect face of a male model. The cops caught him in the wee hours of Saturday morning and he obviously wasn’t clear-headed enough to do what rogue street artists always do in these situations – sign a fake name to a confession to avoid a felony charge. He signed the confession Robin Gunningham and copped a $310 US fine for “disorderly conduct”. Reuters uncovered the NYPD report 24 years later.

And then there’s the Ukraine connection …

The Ukraine connection?

Reuters went on a reverse forensic journey. It found that after the first 2008 unmasking by the Mail on Sunday, all evidence of Robin Gunningham’s existence vanished – no tax records, employment records, property filings, zilch. In 2022 a bunch of Banksy artworks had started appearing on bombed out buildings in Ukraine. Reuters checked the immigration and border control records and found out that Robert Del Naja had entered the besieged country around the same time. Aha! Back to the Massive Attack link.

Naja’s travelling companion was someone called David Jones, whose birthdate happened to match the date of birth listed for Gunningham on the 2000 New York arrest file. There are about 15,000 blokes called David Jones in the UK (most of them probably living in Wales), so what better way to go off the grid by adopting a name so aggressively average it functions as a human camouflage.

Indeed, it’s famously hard to keep up with the Joneses. Oh, and I get it, “Robin BANKS”. Groan. It all fits together. This all sounds pretty convincing. Are you convinced? Does it fit with what we knew so far?

It may not have a red dot on it yet, but I’m prepared to have the evidence framed and mounted in the Louvre (once they’ve overhauled their security). It backs up a lot of what Banksy’s previous manager, Steve Lazarides, wrote in his two-volume chronicle Banksy Captured, published in 2019 and 2020, including the admission Bansky indeed was the artist caught in the act in New York.

Banksy’s longtime lawyer, Mark Stephens, told Reuters that Banksy “does not accept that many of the details contained within your enquiry are correct”. It’s not exactly a denial.

And don’t forget there’s also that old BBC recorded interview that resurfaced 20 years later in 2023, where the interviewer asks Banksy if his real name is Robert Banks, to which the artist replies: “It’s Robbie.” OK, so that doesn’t rule out Robert Del Naja (who also uses the street name 3D) but take a look at the Massive Attack album covers Naja himself has illustrated. They’re plain creepy, like a pharmaceutically induced nightmare. Banksy’s work can be politically acerbic, but it’s grounded in wit and whimsy – more likely the product of some tender-hearted dweeb who gets wasted in New York and paints goofy teeth on billboards.

If it looks like a Robin, sounds like a Robbie, and travels to war zones as a Dave, it’s probably Gunningham.

Why should we care?

We probably shouldn’t. The greatest trick Banksy ever pulled wasn’t making a painting shred itself; it was disguising a middle-aged bloke from Bristol, probably with kids and a mortgage, as a global urban guerrilla, laughing at us behind his comfy Marks & Spencer hoodie for the past 30 years.