The work, a stop sign decorated with what appears to be a trio of military drones, was stolen just one hour after the street artist posted an image of the work to Instagram on December 22.

A man referred to only as Alex told the Sun that two people, using a Lime bicycle as a makeshift ladder, removed the street sign with bolt cutters after one of the two “bashed it with his hands” in a failed attempt to remove the sign from its post.

“I opened Instagram and I saw it was posted four minutes before and I was about to go on my lunch break,” Alex told the Sun. “There were about two people there when I got there. We were all sort of admiring it and taking pictures.”

The alleged crooks stole the work at around 12:30 p.m., in full view of the crowd that had gathered to admire the mysterious Banksy’s newest work. Images of the two men, unmasked and in plain view, were posted to the tabloid’s website.

The first arrest came the following day when London’s Metropolitan police took a man into custody on suspicion of theft and criminal damage. The second arrest was made on Sunday.

While Banksy himself never explains the art he installs under the cover of night, much of what his work has an overt antiwar message. Some of the artist’s more than 12 million Instagram followers have viewed the drone-emblazoned stop sign as a call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Banksy and his artwork often make headlines. Earlier this year, his possible identity was revealed in a recently uncovered, decades-old interview on the BBC, and there has been news coverage about his artworks being removed, demolished, or restored throughout 2023.

After images of the stop sign were posted on Banksy’s popular account (which has 12.1 million followers), commenters immediately responded that it would soon be taken and sold online.

Around 12:30 p.m., two people used bolt cutters and a Lime bicycle to remove the artwork. A witness named Alex told the Sun that one of the people initially tried hitting it with his hands and fell off the bike before returning with the bolt cutters.

The incident follows several other times Banksy has been in the news this year. A mural on Valentine’s Day about domestic violence prompted the removal of a chest freezer twice, a couple discovered a large seagull painted on their home would cost $250,000 to remove, a 500-year-old farmhouse with a large Banksy mural of a young boy was demolished in March, and a damaged mural in Venice painted in 2019 will be restored through private funding. Banksy’s identity was also recently revealed through an archival interview with the BBC.

It first appeared on the wall of the Castle Amusements building in 2017, shortly after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union.

In 2019, after the mural had become a tourist draw for Dover, a major port and entryway to the European Union, it was painted over with whitewash. The town’s leadership discussed the possibility of trying to restore the mural, but ultimately chose to demolish the building as part of a major development project comprised of “cultural and community engagement facilities, as well as residential dwellings.”

A spokesperson for the Dover City Council (DDC) told CNN that “prior to authorising the demolition, and having taken professional conservation advice, [the] DDC determined that the Banksy could not be viably conserved without considerable costs to local taxpayers, even if it were technically possible.”

The spokesperson said further that DDS Demolition, the project’s contractor, was attempting to conserve any parts of the Banksy artwork that it could, having already successfully removed stars and a section of the man and the ladder.

In a statement on the development project, the DDC said it was not involved in covering up the mural in 2019.

Now, an unearthed BBC recording from 2003 appears to confirm that Banksy is indeed a Robert, just not Del Naja. 

In an interview between the up-and-coming street artist and former BBC arts correspondent Nigel Wrench, ahead of Banksy’s Turf War show in East London in the summer of 2003, Wrench asked if he could use Banksy’s real name in the interview, citing that The Independent had already used it. Wrench then asks if his name is “Robert Banks,” and the artist replies, “It’s Robbie.”

An edited version of the recording had recently been used as part of the BBC podcast series The Banksy Story, which was released in July. Wrench, after listening to the podcast series, was inspired to revisit the full original recording and discovered the pivotal information about the artist that was never used.

In the newly surfaced interview a young Banksy also speaks about whether graffiti should be considered vandalism. “If it’s done properly it is illegal! But I got a good reaction I think off most people from my work. You know, I’ve even had policemen in the past say they kind of like things about it, but… I just think it’s my right to go out and paint it,” he says. 

“And it is equally somebody else’s right to go out and paint over it if they don’t like it, you know? It doesn’t actually take very long with a bucket of white paint to paint over things. I think it’s better if you treat the city like a big playground, you know? It’s there to mess about in, you know?”

The lost audio portion can now be heard on The Banksy Story bonus episode, which was released on Nov. 21 and available on BBC Sounds.

Politics often play a role, as has been the case with the many recent protests led at museums by climate activists around the world. Personal interests often can become paramount as well, as they have with a variety of young provocateurs who have targeted others’ artworks, sometimes even as part of their own art practices.

In each case, however, the base motive remains the same: to raise a ruckus by disturbing the look or reputation of art people know all too well.

On Monday, two activists were arrested at London’s National Gallery after attacking The Toilet of Venus by Diego Velázquez “with what appeared to be emergency rescue hammers,” the British institution said in a post on X.

Below, a look at 26 instances of art-world vandalism, from religious iconoclasms to the climate protests that are still unfolding.

Vittorio Sgarbi, an undersecretary in Italy’s culture ministry, said in a statement that the restoration will be funded by an “important bank.” A press conference scheduled for today and dedicated to the subject was canceled without elaboration. ARTnews has reached out to the ministry for comment, however Sgarbi’s office told the Art Newspaper that the restoration will proceed.

The mural, titled Migrant Child (2019), is painted on the wall of a building along the Rio Novo canal, in the heart of Venice’s Dorsoduro district. It depicts a child holding up a flare and wearing a life vest. The mural appeared overnight between May 2019, and is just one of two works attributed to the anonymous British street artists in an Italian city. 

Migrant Child has become a popular tourist attraction, but years of exposure to the damp environment has caused significant damage. The situation prompted arguments among the city’s locals and the larger art community in Italy over whether it should be allowed to gradually fade. Critics were divided over the fundamental purpose of street art: wasn’t its ephemeral nature the point? 

Per Italian law, decisions regarding public art made less than 70 years ago do not fall under the jurisdiction of the state body that oversees heritage preservation.

“I take the responsibility for this restoration given that contemporary art is part of my remit, and it is my job to protect it,” Sgarbi said in the statement, adding that the ministry is not interested in “whether the artist is alive or even if he gives us his permission to conduct the restoration, given that, among other things, the mural was created illegally.”

The Headlines

THE ETERNAL RODENT. Rome began addressing a rat problem around the Colosseum by staging what the city’s head of garbage collection, Sabrina Alfonsi, called a “special intervention,” Reuters reports. That includes setting traps and removing trash. BBC News reports that Alfonsi said that the rats have been congregating near the ancient site, in part, because of garbage left by tourists, which has increased in quantity with the heat wave. Fun fact: There are believed to be around 7 million rats in the Italian capital and 2.87 million human residents. (If everyone would just step up and adopt two or three rats, this problem would be solved.) The special sanitary measures continue this week.

BOFFO BANKSY BOX OFFICE. Banksy’s 10-week show at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland, has drawn 180,000 visitors, which is a record for the museum, BBC News reports. On Fridays and Saturdays, it has been staying open through the night, until 5 a.m. the next morning, which has helped bring in people. Titled “Banksy: Cut and Run,” the exhibition is the street artist’s first official solo show in 14 years, and it closes today. It seems that it will travel, the Independent notes. A text on the exhibition’s official website reads, “We want to take this show on the road but have no idea where to go next. Do you?” It asks people to send specific suggestions. Shoot your shot!

The Digest

Micha Winkler Thomas has been named deputy director of the Harvard Art Museums. She is coming from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where she is now deputy director for strategy and chief operating officer. [The Harvard Gazette]

For at least the 18th time, South Korea’s Cultural Heritage Administration is calling on a man to hand over an important ancient book that was donated to the state but that he is believed to possess. Two searches of his home and office have not located the volume, which may have been damaged in a fire. [The Korea Herald]

Artist Yue Minjun’s debut NFT collection hauled in more than $1 million in the first two hours it was available for purchase, with all of the material selling. [ArtAsiaPacific]

The acclaimed Seattle chef Grayson Corrales will begin running the Frye Art Museum’s Café Frieda in October, serving some of the dishes from her popular Galician spot, MariPili Tapas Bar. [The Seattle Times]

In a letter to the editor, a resident of Buffalo, New York, praised a guard and the director of the city’s AKG Art Museum for their efforts to locate her purse, which she misplaced while attending a jazz concert there. In the end, Apple’s “Find My iPhone” feature came through. [The Buffalo News]

The Kicker

THE BRITISH EMPIRE. The London-headquartered White Cube gallery is readying locations in Seoul (in September) and New York (October), and its founder, Jay Jopling, got the profile treatment from Jay Cheshes in WSJ. Magazine. Among the artists weighing in on the dealer are Anselm Kiefer, Theaster Gates, and Tracey Emin. Emin said that, when she met Jopling more than 30 years ago, “I must have been the only woman in the art world at the time not to fancy Jay.” She will have the New York space’s first solo show, in November. [WSJ. Magazine]

The gift was the first stage of an initiative started by Brown and Richardson, who created the AND1 Mixtape film series, begun in the late ’90s, which documents a traveling basketball competition. The pair aims to teach professional basketball players about art, not only as something to be appreciated but also as something that will appreciate in value.  

“The art world has never really been explained to a lot of professional athletes. They may have seen paintings or pictures their whole lives, but it was never taught that they could get involved with art from a financial standpoint,” Richardson told ARTnews. 

Rookie One Court is organized by Think450, the for-profit wing of the NBA players’ union, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). Along with giving NBPA members control over their likeness and intellectual property rights, Think450, which is named after the total number of players in the NBA, has long been involved in teaching financial literacy to players and their fans.  

“One of the things we’re trying to teach a lot of these players is the value of owning things that accumulate value,” Que Gaskins, Think450’s president, told ARTnews, “as opposed to a depreciating asset like a car.” 

For Gaskins, teaching players to appreciate art is a step toward establishing financial savvy and literacy among players, many of whom fought hard to make out of impoverished neighborhoods.   

“What we are trying to instill is knowledge, getting them comfortable with different things that we think they will have an interest in and showing them that there are ways to create opportunity, generational wealth,” Gaskins said. 

The initiative makes perfect sense for Brown. As the vice president of the NBPA, Brown has been a fierce advocate for social justice and has become well-known for his support of Boston’s black community. Earlier this year, after he set a record for the most lucrative contract in NBA history, $304 million for five years with his Boston Celtics, Brown said he wanted to combat the wealth disparity in Boston and launch a project that would bring a “Black Wall Street” to the city, in part by promoting education in science and technology in underrepresented minority community high schools. 

Meanwhile, Richardson appears to be an ideal partner for Brown. He has gained a strong reputation for his creative advertising agency The Compound, based in Red Hook, which he has run for over a decade. Richardson also once ran an art gallery out of The Compound’s former home in the Bronx, which will soon reopen in Red Hook. In the past, he has acted as an art advisor to NBA players who want an entrée into the art world, like Kevin Durant and Malcom Brogdon. 

Richardson approaches his advisory role much the same way he does all his creative work, with the belief that combining creative influences from different areas will bring about something new and interesting. Collecting, he said, is part of a basketball player’s DNA as much as the originality of their game. Richardson pointed to sports trading cards and comics as collectibles often pursued by young athletes, which later beget collections of jerseys and trophies. And that’s not including the high prices fetched for sports memorabilia from the self-same NBA stars. Earlier this year, Sotheby’s held an auction dedicated to memorabilia, which featured a signed pair of sneakers once worn by Michael Jordan during his last championship season with the Chicago Bulls in 1997–98. They sold for $2.2 million, becoming the most expensive sneakers ever publicly auctioned. 

“In our culture, we’re looking at sneakers as collectibles, and there’s a direct line from that to collecting art,” Gaskin said. Hip-hop is another strong influence on the rise in art collecting, he added. “I think Jay-Z obviously played a big role in having people understand the power of art, the uniqueness of it as a collectible and as an investment vehicle,” Gaskins said.  

In 2018, Jay-Z and Beyonce featured over a dozen major art pieces in the Louvre for their “Apeshit” music video. That came five years after the rapper co-starred with performance artist Marina Abramovic in the music video for “Picasso Baby.” In 2021, Jay-Z and Beyonce, in an advertisement for Tiffany’s, posed in front of a rarely seen Basquiat work, Equals Pi (1982). The couple are known to have an extensive art collection in their 30,000-square-foot home in Malibu, California. Beyond that, Kanye West, Drake, and other major stars have prominently featured or worked with major contemporary artists in recent years. Earlier this month, Kendrick Lamar featured Henry Taylor paintings in performances at Lollapalooza and elsewhere, blown up to stadium size. 

These influences have spurred a trend that has seen major athletes looking to the art world for inspiration, identity, and, of course, investment. Serena Williams has amassed a top-notch art collection in her Florida home that includes KAWS, Radcliffe Bailey, and Titus Kaphar, and her sister Venus Williams served as a model for a recent painting by art market darling Anna Weyant. Six-time NBA All Star Amar’e Stoudemire is a Basquiat aficionado, and ten-time NBA All Star Carmelo Anthony’s collection includes household names like Banksy and Shephard Fairey. 

Through Richardson, Brown was motivated to explore the art world and has begun building a collection of his own. In fact, the limited edition Rafa Macarrón print gifted to the top rookies during the Rookie One party was acquired from Richardson’s mentor, the art dealer Lio Malca, who recently opened a new gallery at 60 White Street in Tribeca. And it’s through Richardson that Brown learned to think of art as, not only an investment but something personal, an extension of himself. 

“As I grow and mature, so does my taste for art and culture,” Brown told ARTnews. “Passing that knowledge down to rookies gives them a chance to get involved when their influence is at its peak. The younger generation are the next influencers of this world so giving them art hopefully gives them the inspiration to learn more but to also develop their view on life.”

The London-based Red Eight Galleries is brokering the deal between the owner of the townhouse property in the British city of Margate where the mural was painted, and Showpiece, a fractional ownership platform.

The mural has an estimated value of $7.64 million (£6 million) through an evaluation by Robin Barton of Bankrobber gallery. The fractional ownership sale of Valentine’s Day Mascara will take place on August 22 with a total of 27,000 shares.

“Realistically, we are looking to achieve between £1m and £1.5m,” Usher told the Art Newspaper, which first reported the news of the sale.

The mural features a 1950s-style housewife with a swollen, black eye, a bruised cheek, a swollen lower lip, and a knocked-out tooth. She wears a bright blue gingham dress, an apron, and yellow latex gloves, and has her arms out.

She was initially shown standing next to an open chest freezer and an upturned plastic lawn chair. The woman appeared to have disposed of an abusive male partner. Only the man’s pant cuffs, black socks, and black dress shoes could be seen poking out of the appliance.

The mural was removed twice in Margate, first by officials from the Thanet district council, then by workers after the owner of the property where the mural was painted called a London gallery for assistance.

Red Eight Galleries CEO Julian Usher told ITV News that the installation of Plexiglas and the removal of the chest freezer were both for security reasons, citing the high cost of guards to protect it around the clock.

While Banksy confirmed the work was genuine on Instagram, Usher said the mural had not been authenticated by the artist’s studio Pest Control. “The lack of authentication means we can’t take it to an auction house,” he told the Art Newspaper. “There is a grey secondary market for these pieces, but in the current financial market, those people are just not there”.

Historically, Banksy and Pest Control do not condone the sale of any work taken out of its original context, with only a few exceptions. Even without that stamp of approval, the mural Crowbar girl was sold for an estimated $2.4 million to a private buyer after it was extracted from the wall of an electric shop in November 2021.

Currently, the mural is on display at the amusement park Dreamland Margate and an agreement has been reached with the owner to show it there for at least 12 months. Usher told the Art Newspaper he spent two months sourcing experts to properly remove the work from the building, which took place at the end of April, at a total cost of nearly $250,000 (£195,000).

The plan is for Valentine’s Day Mascara to remain on display for at least 24 months at Dreamland Margate, where it has been on temporary view since June.

Some of the proceeds of the sales the fractional ownership shares will go to the very cause depicted in Valentine’s Day Mascara. Showpiece has agreed to donate some of the proceeds to the UK domestic violence charity Refuge. The owner of the mural has also pledged a six-figure sum to Oasis, a charity in Margate which supports families seeking to leave and recover from domestic abuse.

The Headlines

TAKING IT TO THE BANK-SY. Fashion designer Paul Smith is sending a Banksy painting to auction at Bonhams in London, where it will be offered on June 29 with a top estimate of £1.8 million (about $2.3 million). Titled Congestion Charge (2004), the work is a pastoral scene rich with trees and plants—and a sign for London’s then-new congestion pricing scheme for cars entering certain parts of the city. (Cheeky!) Smith also sold a Banksy through Christie’s in New York in 2021, the Art Newspaper notes. On that occasion, Sunflowers from Petrol Station went for a within-estimate $14.5 million with fees. Smith has been busy on the art front of late, also staging a Pablo Picasso show at the Musée Picasso in Paris that runs through August 27.

NOTHING IF NOT CRITICAL. In London, Tate Modern just opened a show titled “Capturing the Moment,” and some of the early reviews are . . . not good. Presenting choice loans from collector Pierre Chen’s Yageo Foundation (Hockney, Picasso, Bacon) alongside museum holdings, the exhibition aims to look at the relationship between painting and photography, “a hopelessly broad, well-worn premise for an exhibition,” Jackie Wullschläger writes in the Financial Times, terming the affair a “lazy apology for an exhibition.” In the Guardian, Laura Cumming asks, “Why are the walls of one of our foremost public art museums being given to a private collector in this way?” The show’s “premise feels like nonsense,” she argues, writing, “There is no thesis, no catalogue, no developed argument.” The exhibition runs through January 28.

The Digest

Four ancient Roman temples have opened to the public in Rome. The structures, which date as far back as the third century B.C.E., were unearthed amid demolition work in the 1920s. [The Associated Press]

The 2023 Prix Ars Electronica awards, for artists working with various forms of technology, have gone to Ayoung Kim, Atractor Estudio and Semantica Productions, Winnie Soon, and Sonja Höglinger. They will each get €10,000 (about $10,900). [ArtReview]

At the Detroit Institute of Arts, Yuriko Jackall has been named department head of European art and curator of European paintings. She is currently head of the curatorial department and curator of French paintings at the Wallace Collection in London. [Press Release/ArtDaily]

Michael Finkel’s new book, The Art Thief, follows the exploits of the notorious Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole some 300 works of art over the course of eight years. “This ultra-lucrative, odds-defying crime streak is wonderfully narrated,” Kathryn Schulz writes. [The New Yorker]

To mark the reopening of London’s National Portrait Gallery after an extensive renovation, the Guardian had notables pick their favorite examples of portraiture. Critic Adrian Searle went with a wild Maria Lassnig self-portrait, artist Thomas J. Price an Adrian Piper classic, and curator and critic Rianna Jade Parker an Errol Lloyd painting. [The Guardian]

Headed to Venice this summer for its architecture biennale? Tara Isabella Burton has a guide to exploring some of the quieter corners of the Floating City. [The Wall Street Journal]

The Kicker

ART IS FOREVER. Whoever thought this up deserves a marketing award. The Associated Press reports that the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam is currently hosting tattoo artists, who are giving visitors tattoos of Rembrandt sketches for €50 to €250 (about $55 to $273). Discussing how his process diverges from the Old Master’s, one tattoo artist offered this thought: “The canvas is different. The canvas can talk to you, move too much, float, even faint. That didn’t happen for Rembrandt.” The program is called “A Poor Man’s Rembrandt.” [AP]