A Bourgeois Banksy May Risk Losing Street Creds: Martin Gayford

July 16 (Bloomberg) -- Has Banksy's reputation been fatally damaged by speculation that he is middle class?

There are, of course, still doubts about the claims, published last weekend by the Mail on Sunday, that the mysterious graffiti artist is a privately educated 34-year-old from Bristol named Robin Gunningham.

This is not the first attempt to unmask him. I was confidently informed last year by a fellow artist, who thought he had encountered the undercover painter in a London restaurant, that Banksy's name was Robin Banks. This sounded suspicious -- the name being a little too close to Robin Hood. Banksy's fame has fed on such rumors.

Assuming that the London newspaper's investigative team has pinned him down, will that harm the Banksy myth? His high prices and attendant publicity have been fueled by the mystery over his identity. He has been, as the Mail on Sunday put it, the Scarlet Pimpernel of art: They sought him here, they sought him there.

The allure of this enigma -- irresistibly attractive to journalists -- is reduced by the information, if accurate, that he is the offspring of a retired contracts manager, and attended Bristol Cathedral School. Is this respectable background going to reduce him in the eyes of fans such as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who according to the New Yorker magazine bought several Banksy works at a Los Angeles exhibition?

Middle-Class Myths

Personally, I doubt it. We are too fond of myths and legends concerning artists. The sad truth about them is that they are all middle class. Making art is a middle-class occupation; it has been since at least the Renaissance. Nonetheless, there is a longstanding appetite for stories about artists being poverty- stricken, drunken outcasts.

Who would recognize the description of a late 19th-century artist, one of whose uncles was an admiral and another a powerful art dealer, who lived and painted in the south of France on a private income? Yet that is a perfectly factual description of the circumstances of Vincent van Gogh.

I once asked Tracey Emin whether she felt any kinship with Van Gogh. No, she replied, since he was a spoiled rich boy whose sufferings were voluntary and self-inflicted. She was right, up to a point. Obviously, Van Gogh felt desperate and harried by financial need. Still, such things are relative.

Van Gogh's Ear

The allowance from his brother Theo on which Van Gogh struggled to exist in Arles was around twice the amount on which his friend Roulin, a postal supervisor, was supporting a wife and three children. The artist's poverty was not severe enough to prevent his employing a cleaning lady. Van Gogh's cleaning lady, however, is never going to seize the world's imagination in the same manner as his severed ear.

For that matter, Emin herself is more bourgeois than you might imagine. As she recounts in her autobiography, ``Strangeland,'' when she was young her parents ran a hotel in Margate. Admittedly, things went downhill after that.

Artists create their own personal fables -- it's part of the job. Still, we love them. For that reason, I suspect that Banksy's fans will forgive and forget the contract-managing dad and the public school, and continue to believe in the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel of graffiti art. The question with him is whether the art is as good as the storyline. About that, I'm not so sure.

(Martin Gayford is a critic for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Martin Gayford in London at martin@cgayford.freeserve.co.uk.