Banksy Comes To Town (Briefly!)

It’s now been confirmed that guerrilla artist Banksy was in East Anglia over the last couple of weeks and was responsible for the Mr Potato Head makeover of the statue of Fred Savage in King’s Lynn.

We were strangely fortunate to have ring-side seats for Fred’s transformation as he stands at the end of our road, silently greeting visitors to town as they come in through the South Gates. Banksy’s look for Fred, whilst eye-catching, wasn't really anything new – he’s quite used to being dressed up having spent many Saturday nights/Sunday mornings sporting a traffic cone.

Wednesday 4 August was a fairly ordinary morning when what we assumed to be a cleaning crew set up around Fred's little enclave, followed by a stream of people stopping to take photos. We wrote it off as ‘tourist season’ to start with (we were busy!), but finally noticed Fred was holding something and the same professional looking photographer had been snapping away for some time.

So we went out to have a chat with the photographer, who told us he’d been tipped off that ‘something interesting’ was happening at the statue of Fred Savage. We didn’t have any idea that this was even tenuously linked to Banksy at the time, it was just an amusing diversion. We took a couple of photos, posted them on social media, then got back to work just as the council turned up and took it all down - to much booing from around the street.

Since this is now confirmed to have been the work of Banksy, many of us are curious as to whether the council are confident that they did the right thing or, had they known they had a real-life Banksy under their noses, they might have acted differently. Presumably it was seen as a silly prank, comedic vandalism, but would the fact that the prankster turned out to be a celebrity artist have altered the value of the prank?

My article last week was on the value we place on things and the qualities that we relate to them. Banksy makes an interesting example both because of the messages contained in their work, which usually make some comment on society’s values (highlighting issues of social injustice, greed and indifference towards poverty and suffering), and because of how we subsequently come to value the work itself – public work that people will pay millions of pounds to possess. Towns were holding their breath as they waited for confirmation of whether or not they were in possession of a genuine Banksy, putting me in mind of the scene in Ab Fab when Saffy gives her Mum earrings for her birthday: ‘Do you like them or not?’; ‘I like them if they're Lacroix!’

Locally there’s a sense that, if the council had let the prank play out for a bit, the town could have benefitted further - perhaps a few more curious tourists would have dropped in for a look on their way round the coast and seen that there’s more to King's Lynn than the pain of getting across the Hardwick Roundabout. It’s not as if they can put it all back - the art is in the moment, so they’d just seem grasping and ridiculous, deliberately trying to benefit from the sidelines like a hawker selling knockoffs.

But these thoughts are easy in hindsight and rarely is anything obvious until it’s considered in retrospect - remember what Joni Mitchell said about not knowing what you've got till it’s gone? My partner can now clearly remember noticing the camper van from Banksy’s video as an oddity parked across the street, though it meant little at the time, and we’ve realised that the photographer we chatted to must have been part of Banksy’s crew. So the council might be kicking itself that it didn’t dwell in the moment for quite long enough, or maybe it sees the value of the experience as being in the stories we tell afterwards.??