[Evidence] ♪ About to tell you who I are ♪
♪ I came a long way and I still got so far to go ♪
♪ Tee off with this trademark flow ♪
♪ And after tonight I'm-a let the whole world know ♪
♪ My name is Evidence ♪
Of course they were all wrong. Why?
[Ben Eine] The reason why we do what we do,
you know, breaking the law,
is it's an adrenaline rush.
[The Bummers] ♪ I ain't never seen nothing ♪
♪ Done in the light ♪
♪ I paid for the price ♪
♪ Being dust ♪
♪ Now that you want me I'm unseen ♪
♪ Take what you want, babe ♪
♪ Take it free ♪
You know, we paint stuff on the street.
That's where it belongs.
You know, it's for the people. It's for fun. It's for adventure.
[siren wailing]
It's not to turn up in auction.
Be careful whose artwork you steal
because you're subject to getting your ass beat.
[The Bummers] ♪ Oh, but she came from the south ♪
♪ I never seen her before ♪
♪ I like the curve of her mouth ♪
♪ She liked my moves on the floor ♪
♪ Hey, boy, where are you from ♪
♪ We're all from not around ♪
♪ Why don't you call up your friends ♪
♪ All the girls in your town ♪
♪ I think her name was Denise ♪
♪ She had that long blonde hair ♪
♪ She said, "I'm friends with the band" ♪
♪ I said, "Well, babe, I don't care" ♪
♪ Hey, brother, why ain't you go ♪
♪ Well, as a matter of fact ♪
♪ I think I'm digging your friend ♪
♪ Hey, she's standing out back ♪
[narrator] For decades, their work was dismissed as simply vandalism.
Now, it's the target of a multimillion- dollar international art grab,
paintings removed from public spaces without the artist's permission
and sold at high-end art fairs, galleries, and auction houses.
[Risk] You know, at least give me the right to say
what's gonna be in the gallery, be at an auction.
You can hate my stuff, you can love my stuff, you can steal my stuff.
Give me the right to say what I want to sell or not sell.
[narrator] The most valuable?
Works by British artist Banksy.
His work is selling very well at auctions for millions.
[Ben Eine] There is, yeah, insane value in the stuff that he paints.
[Glen Friedman] It's like fucking buying elephant tusks or something. It's like,
here's this beautiful, incredible animal,
and you're just killing it just so you could own a part of it?
That is fucking foul.
[narrator] This was supposed to be the story of what happened
when Banksy came to San Francisco.
Well, it's a Banksy.
Instead, it became the story of art dealers...
If they would have balls, they would say,
"It's a real Banksy, so we show it."
...museums...
So, he's the Socialist rat.
[laughs]
...and money.
Last offer I had from a collector was for $700,000.
What would you do if you were offered a small fortune
for a painting the artist didn't want sold?
I got people that want to buy it for $700,000,
but I can't give it away for free.
My name is Ben Eine, and I was a graffiti artist.
And now I'm a street artist for...
yeah, want of a better phrase.
My style is a form of typography,
exploring words, their meanings, taking things out of context.
We rock hardest!
It's a fucking cool name!
A lot of the work I do on the street is huge, great big words,
or sentences or messages,
or random, individual letters.
Yeah, pretty much words and letters.
Not pretty pictures and blue skylines.
Our roots are in graffiti.
Our interest was, you know, the letter form,
you know, exploring words, exploring letters,
changing the shapes of things.
["Strudel Strut" by Romanowski feat. Jacko Peak playing]
It's a global art movement.
You know, you got people like Roa, for example, from Belgium.
What he does is just incredibly different
from somebody like Os Gemeos from Brazil
or Herakut from Germany.
Someone came and invited me to paint in New York.
From there, I went to paint in Philadelphia.
Last year, we painted a really beautiful wall in Rome.
Each city crafts and creates its own artists with its own styles.
Retna, he's developed a art form based on text,
kind of leans towards, like, gang graffiti, gang tagging.
He's made it a beautiful art form.
Risk, original writer,
one of the first people to paint up all the freeway signs in LA.
I'm a pretty mellow dude, you know, and I've been shot once,
stabbed twice, shot at multiple times,
um, all for the love of graffiti, you know?
[Eine] Revok, yeah, again, original style,
hardcore writer, hardcore bummer.
Killed stuff.
[Revok] They send kids here in LA to prison for eight, nine years,
for doing graffiti.
This kid Sight went to prison
for eight years for painting graffiti, nothing else.
Hello. I am Anthony Lister.
Anthony Lister, crazy Australian.
[Lister] That one looked great from the roof,
but it wasn't right from the street.
[Eine] He just embraces everything that his art is.
I don't care anymore.
He is his art.
[Lister] The street is about me controlling space.
It's a fever, you know, it's a disease, actually.
Mayhem. Craziness. The end of the world.
The beginning of the world.
The remembrance of this world.
Doze Green, uh, definitely not boring.
He was there at the very beginning
of the movement that created this form of art.
Paris in the early '70s, it was a movement based around protest,
and Blek le Rat was one of the people that was doing that,
and, you know, he's continued doing it to this day.
If you count the number of artists
who are involved in this movement
all over the world, it's absolutely huge number.
It's really huge, and I guess people won't know how huge
until it goes in the history books.
[Eine] Shoe, he stopped doing graffiti
and he took his art form in a different direction,
and it's calligraphy, it's spray paint,
and, again, he works with the letter form.
["Taliban Rockers" by Romanowski playing]
The most famous street artist is definitely Banksy.
I think Banksy great. We needed a Banksy.
He's got something up here, and he's saying something always.
His creativity, just being totally clever,
having something important to say.
[Revok] I think that Banksy has become some a cultural happening
that there's been, like, the Banksy effect.
[Eine] I think Banksy'd been in London about a year,
and I'd seen these strange stencils, these strange messages,
these monkeys proclaiming that one day they'll rule the world,
these little rats with paintbrushes that had written messages around,
and it was like, "This is interesting.
This is funnier than graffiti."
One of the things that adds to Banksy's fame,
you know, it's a curse,
is how secretive of his identity he is.
No one knows who he is, who he is,
what he looks like,
what she looks like, so...
[narrator] Ben Eine is one of a handful of artists
who know Banksy's true identity.
[Eine] I first met Banksy many years ago.
Originally he didn't want people to know who he was
because what he was doing was, you know, 99% illegal.
Yeah, the police would've loved to have captured him.
You know, newspapers in England
would actively seek him out.
They all tried to find out who his parents are,
try to find out who his friends are,
try to find out what school he went to.
They want to expose him.
[Risk] Banksy did what we all want to do, man.
You know, he made it, he did it,
and, uh, he's doing it, and...
You know, I think it's funny, a lot of people are like,
"Oh, man, he's not real. He's not real."
He's more real than all the people saying he's not real.
I know that for sure, you know?
Everybody's aware that Banksy is, you know, the biggest thing in street art.
[narrator] In April of 2010, Banksy came to San Francisco.
[Mike Cuffe] There were thousands of people that came to San Francisco
from LA, Nevada, Utah, Washington State.
People came here just to kind of do the Banksy tour.
I'd get a text message at 12 midnight the next night,
"Hey, another piece just popped up."
[Eine] People saw what happened to Andy Warhol.
Banksy's compared, you know, the next Andy Warhol.
This is the Chinatown piece,
and this is, I believe, the first piece that was put up.
The funny thing about this piece is they actually went into the bakery
a couple days before, and they actually handed the bakery owners 50 bucks
and said, "Do you mind if, you know, we paint on your wall?"
And they were, you know, said, "Sure. What do we care?"
[chatter]
[woman] I like that it has a message to it.
There's a lot of graffiti that has beautiful pictures,
but his artwork is the kind that makes you think about things,
and it's usually promoting peace and nonviolence.
[Cuffe] It's been funny to watch it transition
from a community that had no idea who Banksy was
to one that just, you know, loves this piece.
It's now a piece of the history of Chinatown.
I think, at the time, he was on a tour of America.
But, yeah, he came to San Francisco and painted a lot of stuff.
[man] It's a beautiful wall.
I've actually hoped somebody
was gonna do something here for a long time,
and hoped that it wasn't gonna suck.
And, uh, it doesn't, so we kind of lucked out.
[Cuffe] This is the Indian that was done on Sycamore in the Mission.
They actually backed up with a moving truck,
and they had two mattresses.
And they put two mattresses on either side of the-- this-- the wall.
And then they stationed two guys on each side,
like, talking on their cell phones,
just like, you know, someone's moving stuff.
They really are strategic about not getting caught.
There's not a lot of other street artists that have a team or a crew of people
that act as diversions so they don't get picked up by the cops.
[narrator] Each morning, the city woke to a new painting.
This is the piece on Mission, the bird in the tree.
This is an interesting piece.
Most people see just the tree, but if you look,
this tree in the background actually makes the foliage on top.
Paintings appeared in Fisherman's Wharf,
the SOMA district, and North Beach.
[man] I think it's brilliant.
So, I love that he's controversial,
yet he has a consistency in his paintings and you know it's him,
and then also there's just a class about it,
'cause it's real, like, minute and simple and kind of hidden.
It's not over the top.
This piece, they actually had ladders going up to the building,
and they draped down huge tarps,
and so they kind of covered up the ladders.
And there was a party going on, big party with hundreds of people,
just up on a building over, kind of across the street.
So, they had to wait for, like, three or four hours for this party to disperse
to actually get up there and do this piece.
It probably took 'em, you know, ten minutes,
but they had to wait about four hours to get it up.
["ET's Phone Bill" by Romanowski playing]
[Slightly Stoopid] ♪ Why am I treated so bad, hmm? ♪
We view artists who paint on property without permission
as vandals.
They're breaking the law.
Different cities around the world
deal with graffiti, street art, in different ways.
Basically, they want to get it cleaned off and they don't want to pay for it.
So, the way that San Francisco deals with this
is if you're a building owner and your building gets tagged,
then it's your responsibility to paint over those tags
or San Francisco will fine you.
There was a lot of this dialog going on that, you know,
this guy really didn't care about it.
He just wanted it off his building.
He said the city really was harassing him about getting it off as fast as possible.
We're able to easily, you know, put this on their tax bill
and add a lien on the property if they don't pay it.
If he just cuts that out, you know,
that'll go up for auction for, like, $500,000, easy.
No doubt, it'll sell,
and, you know, it was painted over.
Under the threat of fines to the building owners,
the building owners painted over it.
Anything on street level got tagged over by the graffiti artists, the taggers.
It's been painted over. It's been tagged. This one is basically destroyed.
So, yeah. Basically as fast as it went up, it came down.
It's a huge thing for San Francisco to have these Banksy paintings,
but he'll do one, and within a couple of days
somebody's painted over it, tagged over it, and it's gone.
[narrator] San Francisco resident Brian Greif
watched the paintings disappear one by one
and decided to do something about it.
His plan-- remove a painting and donate it to a museum.
I just want to save at least one of them
so the city can enjoy it for more than 48 hours.
I would say 99.5% of everything I've painted...
in-- within the context of graffiti in the last 25 years is gone.
It no longer exists.
Our art is developed with this attitude in mind,
that it's not gonna last
and it's never gonna exist forever.
[Everlast] ♪ I get by ♪
♪ Got it good ♪
♪ I barely get by ♪
♪ Got it good ♪
♪ I barely get by ♪
♪ I stay a little high ♪
♪ I ain't gonna lie ♪
♪ I barely get by ♪
♪ Stay a little high ♪
♪ I ain't gonna lie ♪
♪ Got it good ♪
This is the one I wanted to save.
You can see the walls-- The wall's been painted over.
It's this white wall right here.
It was the one that said, "This'll look nice when it's framed."
I still get emails to this day asking if this piece is up,
because this is a spectacular Banksy.
That's where that Banksy was, that white wall right there,
and that one, it's gone already.
[narrator] Banksy left one final gift
in the historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood,
a massive painting extending across two buildings.
One on side, a six-foot-tall rat.
On the other, a message to the city.
Apparently, up here on a wall-- Yep, it's up there.
It's still there. There's a Banksy rat on siding that I can get down,
so I'm gonna go try and see if I can get permission to get that done.
On one city block you see-- up above, you see,
"This is where I draw the line," and then you have you know,
one of Banksy's rats finishing it on the other side of the building.
The rat is one of Banksy's most iconic images.
[narrator] Banksy has an army of rats rallied all over the world.
I don't know, why the rat?
They're cheeky, funny,
nasty, smelly, little things,
a bit like graffiti artists,
a bit like street artists.
Uh, okay. I just talked to them.
The rat's still there.
It's on redwood siding, so hopefully it can be taken down.
The owner is incensed.
That building is her baby.
She's owned it since, you know, the late '70s.
It's her pride and joy,
and she's preparing to paint over the rat.
And I just convinced them not to paint over it.
I told them that I want to try and save it, and I'll work with them,
so they've agreed to hold off.
They're not gonna paint over it.
Hopefully I can get a deal done soon before they paint over it
or the city comes in and paints over it
or it gets destroyed like the rest of them.
Have you ever heard of an artist named Banksy?
Yes, we have. Wow, that's-- right there.
Oh, that's a Banksy? That's certainly not graffiti, then.
I mean, it's a respected artist.
If you cut that out and you put that on eBay,
it's worth about $10,000, I mean, I'd say keep it.
Negotiations with the building owner began in May,
and will take months of tedious back and forth to complete.
The owner of the building is so upset
that Banksy painted the rat on her building, she won't talk to me.
She wants me to talk to her manager,
and the problem is he won't return phone calls or emails,
so I'm already kind of at a standstill.
Yeah, from what I understand of the story,
it was a long...
They're worried that I might damage the building...
-...painful... -They're worried about the reaction
-from the community... -...drawn-out operation.
They want to sell it.
It's clear now they're trying to sell it.
[keystrokes clacking]
They think they can take it down and sell it on eBay,
and I'm trying to talk them out of that.
[Eine] You know, Banksy gave these people a gift...
and everyone involved in the project
that actually doesn't even care about the art...
just sees an opportunity to make some money.
The problem now is the city keeps sending the building owner
these letters threatening to fine her
if she doesn't take the painting down.
They're actually threatening to remove the graffiti themselves
if she doesn't remove it within 30 days.
[narrator] As time ticked by,
the rat was in constant danger.
So, you can see somebody got up on the roof last night
and tagged over the words.
Thankfully, the rat's still in one piece.
They didn't mess with the rat.
I'm gonna have to focus on getting the rat down.
This is just getting too complicated.
[narrator] August, the deal changes once again.
My original deal with them months ago
was I would take the rat off this side of the building,
I would repair damage to the wall on that side of the building,
and give them a cash donation.
Now the deal's changed.
They still want everything on that side of the wall,
they still want the cash donation,
but now they want me to repair damage on the other side of the building,
so we're talking new fees for materials, carpentry, scaffolding,
lead paint abatement, permits, legal fees...
October.
Gonna cut straight up and take this whole 16"...
Experts were brought in to figure out the best way to remove the painting.
...go easily back.
Then the cost kept on escalating.
[man on phone] Thanks. Bye-bye.
So, that's a voicemail that I just got
from the guy that owns the building next door
to the Red Victorian Inn where the rat is.
We need access to the roof of his building
to get scaffolding up to take the rat down,
and he's found out who Banksy is now,
and he wants $5,000 for access to his roof.
November. The building owner has one final request
before the rat could be removed.
We finally have an agreement,
and the last part of the agreement is she holds a two-hour discussion
at the Red Vic every Sunday morning about world peace,
and before she'll sign the contract
I have to go to the two-hour world peace discussion at the Red Vic.
[Greif] I don't need all of that at the bottom...
[phone ringing]
...where that last piece of siding is.
I just want the painting from here on up.
Oh, awesome, that helps us quite a bit.
Any, if there's-- any of that wood...
All right.
Well, it's a Banksy.
It's bringing a lot of attention to street art,
and street artists in general, all across the world.
That's, I think the goal for a lot of street artists,
is they want to engage with more people,
connect with more people through their art.
They don't want to limit themselves to a gallery,
and the fact that it's free.
You know, well...
This location in particular is-- It's just so damn high.
You're like, "How did he get up there?"
You can see the roof here,
they think he might've stayed in one of the rooms,
and accessed through one of these fire escapes
and came up this ladder.
But we're two stories up above Haight Street in San Francisco,
and it's not easy to get up here.
He got on the roof and came down here.
They're working right now to begin taking the painting down.
And there's the rat, looking down on Haight Street.
[man] I guess we're officially starting.
[Greif] The scoring is the part that concerns me the most.
[man] So, that's what he's doing right now.
[Greif] That's what he's doing right now with the knife.
He's scoring, he's trying to cut the overlapping paint,
the hundred years of paint,
so we can take each piece of siding off cleanly.
This is where we have to be careful, though.
Take care not to keep from peeling the paint.
[Greif] They can scratch the painting.
Big pieces of paint will come off.
And I hope I didn't spend an awful lot of money
on a bunch of worthless hundred-year-old redwood siding.
This is the hardest part right here, huh?
Uh, I don't know. [chuckles]
I hope so!
[saw whirring]
The second most dangerous part is actually then,
we're gonna take each piece of siding down
and cut the nails off from behind.
So, we have to pry it, get each piece loose,
and then they're gonna cut the nails from behind
so each piece will come off without nail pops
and without damage to the front.
[man] Relief? [chuckles]
Not-- No, not yet.
Not yet?
Nowhere near relief yet.
...worry about the painting.
It's a little bit easier.
-So... -Here.
But we've got about three feet of crawlspace there,
so I can crawl back in there and cut from behind.
...cut from behind, so this is-- this is good, yeah.
You're good.
All right, here you go, Brian.
I don't think it could've gone any better.
First major piece is now off.
From here they got room to move,
room to saw the nails off from behind.
So far, so good.
You want me to try cutting...
All right. Again, I don't think it could've gone any better.
-Perfect. -You want me to try cutting that...
The rat's face!
Critical part.
Last piece.
-Yeah! -All right.
It goes.
-Is that it? -Yep, that's it.
That's it. That's what the Banksy looks like when it's not on the wall.
Everything is all wrapped and ready to go.
We just need to find somebody to restore it
and find a museum to put it in.
[indistinct chatter]
[Romanowski feat. Danny Cao] ♪ You leave your home for days and daze ♪
A painting by controversial British graffiti artist Banksy
has been removed from a building on Haight Street in San Francisco.
The building's owner received a notice from the city
to remove that Banksy artwork under the city's anti-graffiti ordinance.
So, instead of painting over the piece, the owner of the building
made arrangements with an art collector
who plans to restore the painting
and offer it to a museum for public display.
[Greif] The painting is down. It's all wrapped.
It's in safe storage, if you consider the closet
in my one-bedroom apartment safe storage.
That's where I'm keeping it.
[Eine] As soon as word got out the rat on Haight-Ashbury was being removed,
offers from around the world started coming in,
and there were numerous offers
for numerous amounts of money.
I've gotten even faxes from art dealers,
consignment agreements,
offering to pay me over $100,000,
$200,000 in one case.
I'm not gonna back down.
My goal is to find a place to put this where the public can enjoy it.
Eventually, a meeting was arranged with John Zarobell
from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
about preserving the piece,
about the piece going into their collection.
Okay, we're pulling up to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
and talked to them about donating the Banksy.
They've said that they're interested in taking the Banksy from me,
so this is SF MOMA right here.
[John Zarobell] We touch on a lot of different worlds of art,
and many curators are involved in many different domains.
So, when someone like Banksy comes,
that is-- that's got star power
in a totally different artistic domain,
um, that maybe we're not the most attentive to.
You know, seeing this, it's funny because here he blends,
A) the stencil, B) the loose lettering,
you know, just sort of writing with the spray paint,
and then, C) the throwing the paint on the wall, alá Jackson Pollack.
There's this level of street art, perhaps teenagers with spray paint,
and then there's his, which is actually, you know,
a pretty developed pictorial effect. It's, you know, two-tone.
He's figuring out how to use the stencil and make it into a complex--
actually, three-tone piece.
I mean, this is a pretty complex piece of stencil.
You know, this is a very sort of rudimentary piece of street art,
but it's an antiquated idea, right?
This is sort of love and peace.
Now, this is actually in the Haight.
It's sort of Banksy's iconic rat.
Oh, yeah. With the little star cap on, right.
So, he's the Socialist rat. [laughs]
-I took it down. -Mm.
Which is very controversial.
I had an offer last week from, uh, an art dealer in LA.
-Right. -He offered me $200,000.
Oh, my gosh.
I took that down not to sell it, but I'm taking it down
in the hopes that I can donate it somewhere so it is on public display.
-Right. -So, in my original email to--
-to, I think it was to Peter Denny... -Mm-hmm.
...was would you be interested if I donated this piece.
Is it something that SF MOMA would be interested in?
-Well, I mean-- -As a donation.
That's a really good question, because as I said,
we have worked with artists who've done this,
and for us to figure out what our limits are
and how we understand what our collection policies are,
this is something that's constantly expanding and changing.
[woman] I'm actually gonna interrupt here
and say, yeah, I think we can stop this lying.
Um, is the camera off?
They stopped the conversation and basically ushered us out.
And I got an email from John Zarobell today that says,
[reading]
"I just brought up the possible Banksy donation to our department head meeting,
and there are a couple of things we'd like to know.
[reading]
And, he says...
Well, Banksy can't sign off on it for a number of different reasons.
He doesn't authenticate his street pieces because people are taking them down
and selling them at auction for huge amounts of money,
and then the other issue with Banksy is a legal issue.
If he signs a letter of authentication, he's admitting to a crime,
since he doesn't get permission from the building owners
to go up and paint on their buildings.
These institutions are being offered the chance to own a Banksy for nothing,
no strings attached, and they want to attach strings to it,
and they want to say no.
I think, at the end of the day,
it's just the old guard trying to maintain their real estate
and hold on as long as they can.
People would like to see it. It's, you know, it's exciting.
It blows everything else out of the water.
But, you know, it's run by old people, and they don't enjoy it.
[man] I just got an email back from my contact over in Banksy's operation.
It seems kind of upbeat.
I would just talk to your MOMA person and tell them to be on the lookout
for an email in from, um, it's gonna be Pest Control.
That's Banksy's little operation over there.
I'll talk to you later. All right, bye-bye.
So, that's a friend that has contacts with Banksy's people.
I asked him to call and see if we could get something
so we could get this in SF MOMA,
and as you heard on the call, he sounds optimistic.
Some artists make work for...
to be destroyed, right?
They don't want the art to survive.
And if that's the case,
it's not the museum's business
to preserve it against the wishes of the artist.
[man] Again, you were looking for some sort of document
or letter or something from Banksy
that said, "I want this in the museum."
That, and also, of course, to say, "Yes, this is my work."
And with street art, obviously, that's the kind of issue that it wouldn't be
if you were buying a work of art from a dealer.
The museum wouldn't accept it unless they had a document
from Banksy's people saying it was a real Banksy.
[Cuffe] For all you San Franciscans that are wondering
if these were authentic Banksies,
you come to his site, go on his Outdoor section.
Chinatown piece.
This is how he authenticates it.
Puts up a picture.
This is the piece on Mission, the bird and the tree.
Here you have the piece on Sycamore.
This is the piece on Valencia.
This is the piece at the Regency Ballroom, in the alley.
The beginning of the piece on the Haight, "This is where I draw the line."
And then you have, you know, one of Banksy's rats
finishing it on the other side of the building.
[Zarobell] We don't want to do something
that the artist doesn't feel is appropriate, right?
If a work of art is made for a public venue to be out in public,
then perhaps the artist doesn't want to see it in a museum.
Graffiti, street art, it scares them.
You know, if they had any idea,
they would be buying it now,
snapping it up, and putting it in their collection.
Graffiti to them is so new, they don't know good and bad.
You know, they don't know the difference between this kid,
this little kid that's picked up a spray can for the first time
and this guy that's been doing it for 20, 30 years.
To them, they don't know the difference.
There are too many people in this world you can make happy with this,
to-- to worry about those who don't appreciate it, so...
We'll just go where people like us.
The question is when are we gonna be recognized by the people in power?
I don't know when it's gonna be.
Maybe in ten years, 20 years.
Maybe when old people...
Maybe when the movement will be finished, I don't know.
It's a very difficult question.
Three modern museums were offered the painting.
None of them were interested in taking it unless there was
a document from Banksy's people saying it was a real Banksy,
although it obviously was.
[narrator] The museums weren't interested.
But other people were.
I think the ones on concrete, they are very powerful.
Stephan Keszler is one of the world's leading dealers of Banksy street pieces.
He sells Banksy paintings, but without the artist's permission.
In the street art world, he's considered a shyster, a villain.
Himself, he considers himself to be Banksy's biggest fan.
In my opinion, there's nothing more beautiful
to, uh, see...
original Banksy street works,
because they're really amazing.
All over the world, these paintings were removed.
They wind up in auction, and they go for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[man] Is that Banksy?
-Banksy. -It is?
[Friedman] People make art, they make it in context.
There's a reason that they're doing it, right?
And for someone to buy art taken out of context
or taken off of a wall
or, you know, appropriated without the artist's permission,
I mean, why are you doing that, for a fucking investment?
What I do if I take a piece of art
that kids could profit from by looking at it
and I turn it into this good that just benefits myself,
it's really depriving my neighborhood children
of seeing something beautiful.
We have an expertise how to handle these pieces,
how to get them from the wall, how to help them.
We will never taken them personally from the wall,
but I think it's better to take them from the wall than--
from a house wall or a garage--
than to have white paint over them
because then they are gone forever.
I just think it's self-serving.
It's pretty selfish for a person to take something off
that is actually, like, there for the public to enjoy or hate,
but it's still there for the public.
Yeah, you know, you know, we paint stuff on the street.
That's where it belongs.
Some of these works are massive,
and, you know, weigh thousands of pounds.
Yeah, you know, they're cut out from fucking brick walls,
concrete walls, jackhammers, diamond-tipped saws,
packaged up, stored,
and then six months later wind up in an auction house,
and that's not where they're meant to be.
His work is selling very well at auctions for millions.
His work is collected at very high-end collectors.
You know, we make stuff in our studios, and this is the stuff we sign,
this is the stuff we sell,
this is the stuff that we want to represent us in the future.
This is the stuff that, if it turns up in auction,
you know, we're proud for it to be there.
The stuff we paint on the street isn't that.
-[siren wailing] -You know, it's for the people,
it's for fun, it's for adventure,
it's for adrenaline.
It's not to turn up in auction.
I do all kinds of artwork, but there's a lot of stuff I don't want in a gallery.
It's not meant to be in a gallery.
It's not meant to be in an auction.
You know, at least give me the right to say
what's gonna be in a gallery or be at an auction.
You can hate my stuff, you can love my stuff, you can steal my stuff.
Give me the right to say what I want to sell or not sell.
[Eine] I never sign the stuff that I paint in the street.
Everything I've ever painted in the street as the artist "Ben Eine,"
I never put my tag to it.
You know, I don't want that stuff turning up at auction.
[narrator] Banksy has condemned the sale of his public works,
but Keszler says he's doing Banksy a favor.
I think if Banksy is honest to himself sometimes,
when he goes to bed and he doesn't have to do his PR,
I think, in a way, he's thankful that we do this.
Keszler was organizing a controversial exhibit
at the world's largest art fair in Miami...
an exhibit showcasing four Banksy street pieces,
all without the artist's permission.
We acquiring more Banksy street works,
and the other thing is,
uh, we would like to show this, as I said before,
to as many people in the world as possible.
You know, this isn't a Banksy show.
It's a show of his work taken from the street.
You know, newspeople from all around the world were interested.
It was extremely controversial.
[narrator] Keszler claimed after the exhibit
some of his Banksy pieces
would be donated to a museum.
Our goal would be, or is,
that maybe when people see these works
and talk about these works at this high-end venue
that we can make a deal with some of the museums,
better museums in the world,
and we would love to give those works to museums
to show to more people.
So, I just got this email from Stephan Keszler's gallery,
-and it says... -Desperate to find a home for the rat...
[reading]
...Brian called Keszler to discuss museums.
[Greif] My original intent was to take it down and donate it
to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Yeah, you see, everybody's afraid
to do certain things which Banksy doesn't want,
and Banksy doesn't want to do this because then if he says to one museum,
"Okay, you get a street piece and I authenticate it," right,
then he made an exception of the exception,
and then his whole...
uh, story about being...
not happy about this falls apart.
But one day, it will happen.
And one day it will happen if a museum,
let's say like the Museum of Modern Art, or whatever San Fra--
If they would have balls, they would say,
"It's a real Banksy, so we show it."
Keszler wanted the Banksy rat, yeah.
At this time, he had a lot of Banksy pieces,
all removed from the street, and he wanted that in his show.
And is it in good condition?
Uh, yeah.
So, do you want to--
Do you want to have it when we show it in Miami?
Where are you going to show in Miami?
Sorry?
Uh, potentially.
Would you be interested?
One of the provisions for Miami allowing the show to go on
was none of these pieces were for sale.
He also told me that after the show there's a potential museum in Miami
that wants to take some of the works,
and if this is a way for me to get my piece in a museum,
even if it's in Miami, I'm all for it.
[narrator] Four weeks later, the rat was removed from the bedroom closet
and prepped for Miami.
Yeah, so, you know, this rat,
which isn't a small rat, it's pretty big...
One last piece. It's the top of the rat's hat.
Yeah, it was stored in the closet of a, yeah, this dude's apartment for two years.
And, yeah, it's, like I say, it's not a small rat.
It's a big rat.
Since it was taken down, I haven't seen it all put together,
so I'm anxious to see how it held up in my closet,
wrapped in old blankets and sheets for two years.
So, hopefully somebody after Miami wants it.
Because I'd hate to have to put it back in the closet.
[Eine] Miami... December...
Wynwood is the biggest art wank in the world ever.
It's insane.
Whoo!
Miami Art Battle was great.
It brought together so many people, so many different forms of art.
Such a young generation flocked there and gave us so much energy.
[dance music playing]
♪ Watch me now ♪
[man calling out]
[Eine] Every street artist from every country is there,
scrambling and fighting to paint walls.
No one's getting paid.
Everything gets repainted.
Everything is new, fresh, and exciting.
And then, on top of that, you have the money,
the art fans, the dealers selling stuff.
Yeah, it's insane.
It's borderline schizophrenia, actually.
[train horn honks]
It's the poor street kids and the multibillionaires.
And we're doing everything for nothing.
And they're walking home with Banksies for a million dollars.
So, I'm actually kind of stressed right now
because I got a call 40 minutes ago.
The rat has arrived in Miami early,
and it's actually inside the Art Miami complex already.
Uh, they've opened the crate.
They're in the process of unpacking the piece,
and I want to be inside for the installation.
I don't even know where to go. This complex is so huge.
It's an entire city block of white tent after white tent,
and in a couple of days all these tents are gonna be filled
with high-end art from all over the world.
Two years to the day from, uh, the Banksy rat
on Haight Ashbury finally coming down,
two years to that exact day it was reassembled
and put on display in Miami.
[narrator] The Banksy exhibit drew huge crowds.
So, this is a not-for-sale Banksy show
at Art Miami, and the people's reaction is exactly what I thought will be.
People are excited about the works.
They're standing in line, they're writing about this,
and it gives us proof that what we did
with the works that would've been destroyed at the original locations
are very loved by dealers, lovers, and art connoisseurs.
So, this is the proof for us
that it was right what we did and what we are doing.
It was all over the news.
Banksy show. Banksy show. Banksy show.
And it wasn't a Banksy show. It was a Keszler show.
This is Kissing Couple,
one of Banksy's most famous work.
He made it in 2005 in Brighton, England,
and you see two cops kissing each other,
which I think is a very funny way
to show you protest against the establishment.
So, Banksy made this work,
which is named Out of Bed Rat,
in 2006 in Los Angeles.
He made it in-- on Melrose Place.
[Greif] I don't know how I feel about this.
It's like when you see a deer in the wild, it's cool.
When you see a deer's head on the wall, it's not so cool.
These things were actually put on display
as trophy heads,
but, you know, sometimes it's really cool to look at trophy heads.
[cheering]
[Greif] The weird thing is they set the rat up
right across from the VIP cocktail lounge.
They look out of place,
but there's a lot of work that looks out of place in there, and yeah.
It's a capitalist thing, you know? It's the emperor's new clothes.
Most of the artwork that's in galleries is bullshit.
Most of the reason the people are selling art is bullshit.
They're just trying to make money,
and they're just talking up bullshit because they can control it.
[narrator] Banksy condemned the show.
Street artists refused to attend.
Is-- Is this a film about that?
[man] Yeah.
Oh, well, I mean, f...
Look, really, I don't even, like,
I don't care, like, if you're asking me if I'm gonna go see it,
probably not-- no, definitely not.
I'm not gonna wait in a line to go and see that.
And especially 'cause it's not like where it was, I guess.
Pfft. I mean, really, I've got no comment about that.
So, yeah, I heard these rumors
that somebody was gonna vandalize the Banksy paintings at the show.
Opening night, suits, cocktails, security guards...
[man] There was some talk that people might try to come in
and vandalize the Banksies. Had you heard that?
First of all, if you see here, there's 24/7 security.
If they do this... they will go to jail.
So, I'm not worried about that.
...which, uh, unfortunately never happened.
It would've been fun.
Now, Banksy's condemned the show.
Yes.
How do you feel about that?
I don't care. He is painting his works
on houses or properties of other people without asking.
If I do my own canvas, then I obviously feel like I have rights,
but if I do it on somebody else's property, then I would say no.
That, no.
He expect that what we are doing,
we need to ask him for permission.
So it's a hypocritical argument, what he does.
They should respect the artist and, like, what they wanted,
and not just, like, "Oh, it needs to be in this art show thing."
So, I can understand that it doesn't necessarily fit his aesthetic
to be on the wall inside a museum or a gallery.
He doesn't trust the gallery system.
He doesn't necessarily agree with how it works.
Uh, he wants to do everything on his terms,
and, you know, he's successful at doing that.
There is a big market now,
a big, very important market of street art,
a lot of money is involved in street art now,
a lot of money.
This hype about Banksy right now where nobody knows who he is
and what he is, I think, is a very strategic and smart way
from him to get his work and to get him more famous.
[narrator] In 2005, Banksy did several paintings
on the division wall in Palestine.
Ben Eine was with him.
I went to Palestine with Banksy.
Uh, it was our first trip to Palestine, and...
Yeah, we went and painted quite a few pieces
on the segregation wall,
on bombed ruins,
on basically huge lumps of concrete.
And we spent two weeks over there painting all day, every day,
and, yeah, we left Palestine,
and we never expected to see any of those paintings again.
Two of them turn up in Miami.
This is Wet Dog.
He made it in 2007, uh, in Palestine.
It's about 1,800 pounds.
It's a really heavy piece.
We restored it the way it is right now,
and it was seen on the stone next to a bus station in Palestine.
And now it's here.
This piece is Stop and Search.
It was also made in 2007 in Palestine, West Bank.
It shows a little girl with a soldier
from the occupying force of Israel,
and this was a very strong statement of Banksy
to protest against what is going on in the Middle East.
You see here all the bullets, shots in there,
so I think this is one of the most famous Banksy pieces in the world.
I mean, I can't imagine someone
going to the Middle East,
where there's been conflict for, you know,
thousands of years,
and an artist in this day and age goes there,
seeing what's going on politically,
and is trying to make a statement,
you know, and share something with the people
and try and make a positive impact,
and some fucking asshole comes and just takes the shit off a wall there
and tries to sell it to someone
in a fancy neighborhood somewhere else in the world
who happens to have enough money to pay for it?
I mean, what the fuck is that?
I mean, what sense does that make?
He's trying to, like, soothe a very chaotic and sensitive place
with some art, you know, for the people,
and then some fucking asshole
comes out of left field and, like, because he can make a buck,
you know, like, rips it out and like, you know...
It's deplorable.
Do we profit from it? Yes.
Do we put a lot of effort into it? Yes.
So we both deserve it.
[Eine] Keszler knew that the rat was preserved.
He wanted to buy it.
He obviously had people that wanted to buy it from him.
He wanted to own this painting.
Yeah. So, the first thing is it's not for sale here.
So there's not even a discussion about this.
And, um... I think it's, right now, my guess is
that it's not-- It's not a million dollars.
It's not.
Also, my big pieces are not a million dollars.
So, I think it's-- I--
I think it's a couple of hundred--
I-I-I think I could sell it easily--
Easily-- This cost me hundred thousand dollars also here.
I think I could sell it for...
Two hundred, two hundred fifty, net, for you.
Well, then I would-- I would get a hundred thousand.
So three hundred fifty, more or less,
and you would get two hundred fifty or something like this.
You know, it's frustrating, but, you know, when money gets involved,
this is what happens.
But this is much more...
sellable, or commercial,
because you can hang 250 pounds better in your apartment
than a 3,000 or 2,000 pound concrete wall.
[narrator] What happened to Keszler's Banksies after the exhibit?
[auctioneer] We can start the auction, and we start with the Lot 1.
[narrator] Wet Dog, one of the pieces from Palestine,
turned up at an auction in Miami,
alongside a new Banksy street piece
called Slave Labor.
[auctioneer] ...70,000, 80,000, 90,000...
[auctioneer fades]
I'm back from Miami, and I brought back the actual catalog for Art Miami,
and the very first piece featured in this big, thick catalog is my Banksy.
And then you flip to the next page,
and another picture of my Banksy from the Red Vic,
along with the other Banksies that were exhibited.
There shouldn't be a price tag on them. They shouldn't be at auction.
They should be out in the public where people can enjoy them for free.
Keszler wanted the Banksy rat.
So, here's an email directly from Stephan Keszler.
It says, "We're putting together our new brochure
for Banksy originals...
[reading]
If yes, I would suggest a minimum price we both have to agree on,
and an equal share.
Thanks, Stephan."
The rat wasn't for sale. He wanted to buy it.
The price that he was going to pay for it kept on going up.
Two weeks later, there was an offer of half a million dollars on the table.
He had called me and offered me $500,000 for my Banksy.
And here's the email. It says...
He seems okay with my decision at this point,
but then his tone changes.
So, this email came the very next day from Stephan Keszler. It says...
"Stephan."
Haven't heard from him since.
Half a million dollars is a substantial amount of money by anybody's standards.
You know, to say no to that, well, obviously this dude's
not just somebody who's trying to, you know, flip it
and, you know, capitalize off of it and make a quick buck, is he?
Yeah, you know, this is the irony of, you know, Banksy street art,
you know, taken down from the street.
Here's this guy that has a Banksy piece and he wants to give it to a museum,
and they don't want to take it,
and yet somebody's prepared to pay half a million dollars for it.
You know, it's-- it's the beauty of street art.
[narrator] Art dealers continue to remove and sell Banksy's public paintings.
Banksy doesn't see a single penny from the sale of these works.
[Eine] At some point, he'll stop painting. At some point, he'll die.
These paintings will never be made again.
People want them.
There's-- yeah, insane value in the stuff that he paints.
So, a couple things that I've noticed...
[narrator] The Haight Street rat was eventually sent to Southern California
to be preserved and fully restored.
[Greif] One of the things I want to do is protect the edges
from being banged or chipped...
[narrator] With preservation, the total cost of saving the rat?
Over $40,000.
If it is boxed in, then the frame would obviously be...
[Greif] So, it's back in San Francisco, and I'm really happy with the restoration.
It looks a lot better than it did in Miami,
and what I like about the restoration is I wanted them
to make it look like it did on the wall of the building
and not, you know, like a preserved painting,
and they've done that.
You know, there are still cracks in the paint.
There are nails.
You can see the nails that are sticking out and bent over.
So, it looks really good.
[narrator] The restoration became front-page news
in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The publicity generated a new wave of offers from private collectors,
including an offer of $700,000.
That offer was rejected.
[Justin Jack] ♪ I got the money ♪
♪ I got the money for you ♪
Since the article in the San Francisco Chronicle,
I've been flooded with people that want to show it
and people that want to buy it,
but unfortunately, none of them are really good fits.
I had somebody call me--
they wanted to put it up on the gate outside their house,
in the redwoods north of San Francisco,
which, for me, doesn't work.
So, you know, I'm still looking for a home for it.
Hopefully, we'll find a place to put it.
The last offer I had from a collector was for $700,000,
which I turned down.
Good for him, man.
If he's really not doing it for the profit and he wants it in a museum,
and he believes that strongly about it, I think he's doing the right thing
because eventually, you know, it'll gain traction and it'll get in a museum.
[Greif] I've learned a lot, and I've me a lot of graffiti artists,
and, you know, they all have sort of a different take on it.
Some think I never should've touched it or should've left it up,
and if it got destroyed, it got destroyed.
The whole thing with conserving shit
that's been done on the street,
it makes no sense.
You know, others say it's a good thing, and I know some of the graffiti artists
are saying that maybe we need to rethink this whole temporary art form thing.
I don't know. You know, like, right now, today,
I wouldn't want one of my paintings preserved.
A hundred years' time, when I'm dead and none of them exist,
I would love for one of my paintings to be preserved.
It's, you know, it's a double-edged sword.
The art that was done in this movement in the public, which is important,
is all gonna be gone.
So, the whole idea of this being a temporary art form
and it's okay if it gets, you know, painted over or destroyed,
to me, really needs to be re-thought.
Well, it's part of history. You know, we're gonna talk about,
"You remember when people were taking all of our pieces
and putting them in museums. We didn't want them there"?
There's gonna be a period of work that's, you know, work that's out of context.
It's gonna be all this work that's like, "What period was that from?"
"Oh, that was the work that wasn't supposed to be in a museum."
So it all, you know, it's all relative.
[Greif] There's no doubt that it's a Banksy.
There's no doubt that it's an important Banksy.
It's iconic Banksy imagery.
For it to be protected and to then take on an entirely new life and last,
even if it's in a different context,
just keeping it for, you know, historical sake
or whatever, like, yeah, that's rad.
If you can save art, it's... Do it.
[Greif] You know, Banksy pieces like this either get destroyed
or they get sold and they end up in somebody's house
where the public can't see it.
And, you know, we were able to take this one down, preserve it,
and, you know, hopefully at some point
it'll be up in a place where the public can see it
you know, 24/7.
♪ I got the money ♪
♪ I got the money for you ♪
So, it's funny, you know.
I got people that want to buy it for $700,000,
but I can't give it away for free.
I don't know, man. What's the moral to the story?
Is there a moral?
If there was a moral to this story, it's, you know, for once,
greed didn't win.
The good guys did.
You know...
It's there, it's preserved,
it will turn up in a museum,
and it's not gonna hang on somebody's house in the Hamptons.
Yeah, the good guys won, I suppose.
When the Earth explodes, it's all gonna be stardust, anyway.
In 50 years' time, everyone's gonna be grateful.
Yeah, that's the moral, probably.
♪ I got the money ♪
♪ I got the money for you ♪
[song continues indistinctly]
[narrator] And what would Banksy think of all this?
I'm pretty sure he would find it amusing that people care this much
about something that took him ten minutes to paint.
Yeah. Yeah, he would laugh.
♪ All I do is feel the pain ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ All I do is feel the... ♪
♪ All I do is feel the pain ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ Based on a true story ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
♪ My life and your life ♪
♪ Uh, let's go ♪
♪ Pain ♪
♪ Uh, that's pain ♪
♪ All I do is feel the pain ♪
♪ Nothing more, nothing less ♪
♪ I feel it hella close to the chest, yeah ♪
♪ Pain ♪
♪ Uh, that's pain ♪
♪ All I do is feel the pain ♪
♪ Nothing more, nothing less ♪
♪ I feel it hella close to the chest ♪
♪ The end of last year was a tad bit crazy ♪
♪ My ex-bitch lied and cheated on me crazy ♪
♪ When I think about it, wasn't all that crazy ♪
♪ I got on my knees and prayed for the Lord to save me ♪
♪ Tired of working dead-end jobs, least I got a J-O-B ♪
♪ Then I got a DUI, damn, I gotta testify ♪
♪ Inside the courtroom, spent a night in jail ♪
♪ Bitch couldn't pick me up, working on her nails ♪
♪ Damn, that shit is real life ♪
♪ Then they had to die twice ♪
♪ Handcuffed to a chair ♪
♪ When the shit is all clear ♪
♪ Nice guys finish last ♪
♪ So I'm an asshole ♪
♪ Suck the dick, gag, bitch ♪
♪ Holding up my cash flow ♪
♪ Can't turn this over to a housewife, late night ♪
♪ You see these niggers leave her swimming with the semen ♪
♪ Yeah, bitch, she was a ho ♪
♪ This is my retaliation ♪
♪ You deserve a trombone at your skank-ass bitch ♪
♪ Pain ♪
♪ Uh, that's pain ♪
♪ All I do is feel the pain ♪
♪ Nothing more, nothing less ♪
♪ I feel it hella close to the chest, yeah ♪
♪ Pain, pain, pain-pain ♪
♪ Nothing more, nothing less ♪
♪ Pain, pain, pain-pain ♪
♪ I feel it hella close to the chest, yeah... ♪
["Aging" by the Wind and the Sea playing]
♪ And as you grow, my son ♪
♪ You lose faith in man ♪
♪ With a perfect plan for our kind ♪
♪ And as you age, my boy ♪
♪ You lose faith in God ♪
♪ Wound the sweet path flow by and by ♪
♪ And you weep without a reason ♪
♪ And you cry without cause ♪
♪ You fucked up every thing you got to do ♪
♪ But it's all... ♪
♪ And when you go ♪
♪ You fall in love with a girl ♪
♪ She makes you hang on forever ♪
♪ This year suits you ♪
♪ Like a bastard child... ♪