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Associated Press

Years before the rise of Instagram, Banksy figured out that the key to real influence lay not in being famous, but in anonymity.
The mystery of his identity has long been part of the value of his art, which, whether stencilled on public walls or self-shredded on the auction block, has defied authority across continents for decades.
Now, Banksy’s apparent unmasking by Reuters has generated talk about whether the works themselves retain their cultural and financial value.
It also raises the question: why pop the red balloon of his mystique in the first place? Many Banksy fans mourned the loss of the mystery and lashed out at the news outlet. One said it was like being told without warning that Santa Claus does not exist.

“I feel like they are telling me how a magic trick is done,” says Thomas Evans, an artist based in Denver, in the US state of Colorado. “Sometimes I just want to enjoy the magic trick.”
But some art experts say the murals and the message will survive Banksy’s naming because his appeal was not driven solely by his anonymity.
He and his works – mischievous and also dark – stand as witnesses to injustice, oppression and inequality around the world, from the artist’s native England to walled-off Bethlehem and war-ravaged Ukraine. Subtract his anonymity, they say, and the work still inspires reflection and discussion.
“People buy his works because they absolutely love it,” says Acoris Andipa, director of the Andipa Gallery in London. “The main feedback I get is that they really, frankly, don’t care if they know who he is.”
Banksy, long thought to have been born Robin Gunningham around 1972, grew out of a tradition of street artists who viewed the undercover act of posting their art in public as a subversive form of expression.
The post-industrial landscape of his native Bristol was his canvas and gallery. The walls of London, New York and elsewhere gave him a global stage just before the rise of social media.


Banksy’s apparent identity has been an open secret among protective fellow artists, and has long been easy to find online for those who wanted to know.
There is evidence that even some in the establishment Banksy was protesting against have accepted him. They did not arrest him, for example, after the Royal Courts of Justice removed a Banksy stencil depicting a judge in a traditional wig and gown beating an unarmed protester with a gavel. Some street artists groused that they might be arrested for creating such graffiti – but when it is a Banksy, it is art.
On September 17, 2000, a Robin Gunningham was arrested for defacing a Marc Jacobs billboard atop a building on Hudson Street in New York.
In a handwritten signed confession, he described the work on the night in question: “I had been out drinking at a nightclub with friends when I decided to make a humorous adjustment to a billboard on top of the property,” he wrote in court records. “I painted eyeshadow, a new mouth and a speach [sic] bubble” on the photo of a male model. He was charged with a misdemeanour.
The artist does not need an alleged naming to make news. He created multiple works just in London in 2025, and grabbed headlines elsewhere for having his art sold or auctioned for millions. But Banksy has courted a public image centred around morality, justice and guerrilla tactics – he is often likened to Robin Hood or Batman.
“Banksy woz ere,” he wrote with his animal murals at the London Zoo, which were removed in 2024.

Still, along with the sadness, there is ample speculation in the art world and on social media that the artist himself orchestrated this round of naming. He did not deny the Reuters story.
That “would be very much in line with his practice of stunts and satire”, observes Madeleine White, the senior sales and acquisitions consultant at London’s Hang-Up Gallery, “As they say, ‘all publicity is good publicity.’”
Named or not, Banksy’s stardom lives, art experts say.
It endures in the wonder of his ability to erect new art under the noses of authorities well into the age of closed-circuit television and social media. It appeals because his spectacle and wit draw people in, and the settings – the hulk of bombed buildings, for example, or Israel’s towering wall at the border of the West Bank – invite them to reflect. Now, fans are on the lookout for how and whether he will respond to the news.
Joe Syer, a Banksy expert and founder of art trading platform MyArtBroker, says that the artist has always responded to world events. “And that’s where the real relevance, and value, sits.”
“If anything, Banksy’s anonymity has functioned less as a celebrity device and more as a way to keep the work universally accessible, detached from personality, ego, or biography,” he says in an email. “It allows the work to sit in public space, politically and culturally, without being anchored to an individual in the way the mainstream press often frames it.”

Christopher Banks, founder of the New York-based Objects of Affection Collection, reads Banksy’s naming “not as a biographical event, but as a structural stress test” of the artist’s system of managing his absence.
“Banksy’s best works carry their meaning without the author. He was there,” Banks writes, citing the artist’s murals in Ukraine and his solidarity with the war’s victims.
“The name matters less than the presence. The presence was always what the work was about.”


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Banksy’s identity may have been revealed, but does this mean the ‘magic’ is over?

A suspected Banksy piece seen in Venice, Italy, in 2019, depicting a migrant child holding a pink flare. Fans of the guerilla street artist have mourned the apparent revelation of his identity, but art experts say his true magic is in his message rather than his anonymity. Photo: Reuters

A woman takes a picture of a suspected Banksy piece on a destroyed building in the Ukrainian town of Borodyanka, in November 2022. Photo: AP

A dogwalker looks at a mural suspected to be by Banksy in Bristol, UK, in February 2020. Photo: Reuters

People walk past Banksy’s “Cameraman and Flower” on the opening day of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on January 22, 2026. Photo: AP

Visitors walk past a replica of the artwork by street artist Banksy, depicting a gorilla releasing animals, on the front of a shutter outside London Zoo, in August 2024. Photo: AFP

A suspected Banksy piece on a destroyed building in Borodyanka, Ukraine, in November 2022. Photo: AP

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Arts

As fans slam a Reuters report sharing the street artist’s suspected identity, some art dealers say his value isn’t driven by anonymity alone


As fans slam a Reuters report sharing the street artist’s suspected identity, some art dealers say his value isn’t driven by anonymity alone.


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Banksy’s identity may have been revealed, but does this mean the ‘magic’ is over?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}As fans slam a Reuters report sharing the street artist’s suspected identity, some art dealers say his value isn’t driven by anonymity alone

As fans slam a Reuters report sharing the street artist’s suspected identity, some art dealers say his value isn’t driven by anonymity alone