Art by Banksy

Nobody officially knows who Banksy is, which is itself part of the work: a Bristol street artist who's spent three decades staying anonymous while becoming one of the most commercially valuable living artists on record, a contradiction he seems to find pretty funny. The most-cited theory points to a man named Robin Gunningham, but it's never been confirmed, and Banksy's team has never so much as acknowledged the question.

The stunt everyone remembers: in 2018, moments after Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby's for over a million pounds, it started shredding itself inside the frame, via a device Banksy had apparently built into it years earlier in case it was ever auctioned. The half-shredded piece was retitled Love Is in the Bin and later resold for over $25 million. The self-destruction made it worth more, not less, which was probably the actual joke.

The work outside the auction house tends to be angrier: refugee camps, surveillance, the Israeli separation wall, where he built a guesthouse called the Walled Off Hotel advertising "the worst view in the world." In 2026 a new piece appeared in central London, a bronze-toned statue of a suited man walking off a ledge, blinded by his own oversized flag, read by most critics as a jab at nationalism. It's the same move he's been making since the Bristol underpasses: put the punchline somewhere the establishment has to trip over it.