Can you tell a Banksy from graffiti? Take our quiz to find out

The mysterious Bristolian’s street art has lost the power to provoke or surprise – it’s now hard to tell a geniune article from a fake

Like an artistically-inclined Scarlet Pimpernel, the pseudonymous Banksy has struck again. This week has seen no fewer than three artworks appear on the streets of London that the artist has claimed credit for. There was a goat on top of a wall on Kew Bridge on Monday; two elephants stretching out their trunks towards one another on a house in Chelsea on Tuesday; and Wednesday saw the arrival of three dancing monkeys on a bridge near Brick Lane. On Thursday, the image of a howling wolf was stenciled on a satellite dish in Peckham, south London. And, of course, it’s now been stolen. Not to be outshone, the chi-chi neighborhood of Walthamstow has now got its own Banksy – a pelican swallowing a fish, painted above a fish and chip shop. 
It is wholly possible that there will be a steady number of such artworks appearing throughout the week, month or coming years. As James Peak, presenter of The Banksy Story, told the Today programme on Wednesday: “It might be the early days of a wider campaign starting up”. Some might regard this as thrilling – Peak said “How exciting if there was an emerging campaign of pieces to be found around London over the next few days or weeks. He’s got form for that” – and others might see it as attention-seeking from an enfant terrible whose continued ability to attract column inches (indeed, as the existence of this piece proves) is now disproportionate to his talent. 
To quote Telegraph art critic Alastair Sooke: “If [the new artworks] do mean something, it is, surely, simply this: that Banksy is British art’s Max Clifford, a masterful media operator who knows how to secure publicity.” Even as people might coo and applaud his animal stencilling, the question has to be asked: is Banksy now in decline? Has the arch parodist simply become a parody of himself?
For his biographer Will Ellsworth-Jones, author of 2012’s Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall, the answer is no, but only up to a point. “He is as popular as ever; witness how a mountain goat and then two elephants make headline news.” Nonetheless, as Ellsworth-Jones suggests, “they are enjoyable pieces but they are not making any earth-shattering point, or if they are I can’t see it.” 
Even if we are about to enter into the 12 days of Banksy, eagerly awaiting every new artwork – four French hens? Five turtle doves? – it is doubtful that they’re going to set the cultural world a-leaping with anticipation as to his next move. Banksy, once the hottest and most discussed artist in Britain, is now in danger of becoming predictable. His guerrilla artworks can be regarded purely as something pleasantly decorative, rather than aesthetically interesting. 
When compared to his near-contemporary Damien Hirst – another one-time wunderkind whose public reputation for mischief-making has long since overshadowed his artistic achievements – Banksy can, at least, point to his much-prized authenticity. Unlike his fellow Bristolian Hirst, Banksy first came to prominence in his home city as a street artist, without any formal training – Hirst, by contrast, trained at Goldsmiths – or well-heeled gallerists to offer him patronage.  
Even by the standards of the art world, his rise to fame was meteoric. In 1998, he produced his first large scale mural, The Mild Mild West on a side street in Bristol, depicting a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at riot police, and, by 2003, he was designing album covers for Blur, on their Think Tank album. 
The five years in between saw Banksy publish two pamphlets, 2001’s Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall and 2002’s Existencilism [sic], which saw him offer a mission statement of sorts for his artistic purposes. Amidst a welter of (intentional?) spelling and grammar mistakes, he argued that the purpose of graffiti in society was to act as a form of protest, and that unlicensed, renegade artwork such as his was as valuable as any kind of rioting or civil disobedience. Perhaps it is no coincidence, as large parts of Britain are currently torn apart with public disorder, that Banksy has once again resurfaced, and perhaps his new artworks will have a wider social meaning that becomes clear in the next few days.
Or they won’t. Oscar Wilde may have written in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray that “all art is quite useless”, but Banksy has either not read Wilde or has chosen to ignore his edict. Certainly, he is now one of Britain’s most famous living artists – along with Hirst and David Hockney – and someone whose antics over the past three decades have attracted attention in a way that few artists’ exploits could ever hope to compete with. Yet it is important to maintain a sense of proportion about him, too. 
It is undoubtedly true that much of the intrigue with Banksy comes from the endless speculation about his identity. The Mail on Sunday has suggested that he is a privately educated man named Robin Gunningham, something that several of his schoolmates have attested to, although a persistent rumour also suggests that he is none other than Massive Attack’s songwriter Robert del Naja, who was also involved in urban art prior to his musical career and knew Banksy from the Bristol scene. 
Ellsworth-Jones comments that “I don’t think coverage of Banksy is coloured by people trying to guess his identity – if you really want to find out who he is, research the web. But I do think his anonymity has always worked to his advantage. It just increases the interest in him. If we all knew his real name was Bill Bloggs or Will Jones, we might still like his work just as much but it wouldn’t be quite the same.” 
It’s been suggested that ‘Banksy’ is a name for a collective with several different members, or alternatively, like Hirst, that various underlings execute works to his specification. Either way, his distinctive style is now verging on cliché; his most recent artworks are more notable for their appearance than their content. 
Certainly, whoever or whatever Banksy is, his art sells for a fortune these days. The original artwork for the Think Tank album reached £75,000 in 2007; then a record price for his work, and now it seems like the bargain to end all bargains. His 2009 painting Devolved Parliament sold for nearly £10 million in 2019, leading Banksy to comment on his official Instagram page “shame I don’t still own it.” 
And this was soon surpassed in 2021 when his work The Balloon Girl, which was automatically shredded after selling at Sotheby’s for £1 million in October 2018, was renamed Love Is in The Bin and sold for a staggering £18.5 million, again at Sotheby’s. There are stories of people trying to remove walls that original Banksy pictures have been stencilled on and attempting to sell it as unique works of art. Most of these have failed, and it is not hard to imagine Banksy enjoying the chaos that his efforts have wrought. 
His penchant for disturbing the status quo – or attention-seeking – came into public view a few weeks ago at Glastonbury when, during Idles’ set, an inflatable raft with dummy migrants was launched above the crowd. The audience assumed that the stunt was part of their set until Banksy claimed credit for it via social media, and, as with so much else he has done recently, it divided opinion. 
Some, including Ellsworth-Jones, suggest that it was bold and necessary; his biographer suggests “I don’t think he is an attention seeker so much as a thought provoker. He has put his money where his mouth is in funding the Louise Michel boat rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean and the Glastonbury life raft reminds people of what he believes in – whether you agree with him or not.” 
But for many, the stunt reinforced the image of Banksy as an overgrown schoolboy, sniggering at the back of the classroom while pulling pranks on the teacher, but achieving little of any lasting value. 
Which is not to say that, at his best – or most accomplished – Banksy is incapable of accomplishing things that successfully blur the boundaries between art and social achievement. When he headed to Gaza in August 2015 to paint a series of murals that alluded to everything from Rodin’s The Thinker to a kitten playing with a ball of rusted metal, his work made a real political point with a combination of anger and wit. 
If he could be bothered, it seemed, there was a future for him as a satirist par excellence – Gillray or Rowlandson for the 21st century. As he sardonically observed, “I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens.” 
This may or may not be true, but the work that he is currently producing entirely lacks the bite and anger of his most accomplished art. Unless there is some as yet unsuspected twist coming, the latest stencilling may as well be anodyne pictures of kittens, for all the social worth it possesses. As with the Glastonbury stunt, it’s something that you would never have said of his earliest work: it’s obvious, without the redeeming factor of excitement. Many of Banky’s most enduring and interesting artworks came complete with a “how on earth did he do this” element of genuine surprise. Today, it is a pleasant diversion, and little more. 
Certainly, the reaction to his latest stunt suggests that we’re not entirely bored of Banksy yet. But it’s almost worse: we’ve become accustomed to him, and it’s only a matter of time until someone bestows the kiss of death on his credibility by referring to him as a national treasure. While it is doubtful that he loses sleep thinking about what the art establishment makes of him, it’s also notable that few critics and gallerists seem at all interested in him. 
One eminent art writer who I contacted for this piece declined to offer a comment. “I write about art, and Banksy is just commerce,” he explained. While this element of the punk rocker suits his persona, there must, surely, be some part of him that resents the establishment’s cold shoulder. 
If he wants to stand out once again, then it’s time for something wholly different. It is hard to imagine him abandoning his cloak of anonymity and becoming a Royal Academician, but something has to change. 
“The thing about Banksy is that, over the last decade, every so often he produces something really big in between continuing with his graffiti,” says Ellsworth-Jones. “Look at Dismaland in Weston-super-Mare in 2015, or the Walled Off hotel in Bethlehem in 2017, his shredded painting at Sotheby’s in 2018, his solo exhibition in Glasgow in 2023… I think it is time for another big bang from him, and this could be it. One more animal and it will look like he is turning London into a massive zoo.”