Banksy After Death. Authorship, Anonymity, and the Legal Fiction of Continuity.
The artist known as Banksy occupies a singular position in contemporary art: globally recognisable, institutionally collected, and yet legally elusive. His continued anonymity has often been framed as a conceptual gesture—an extension of street art’s resistance to authorship, celebrity, and commodification. Yet anonymity also produces a more profound juridical and market consequence: it obscures the moment at which authorship legally ends, namely death. This essay explores a deliberately unsettling hypothesis: what if Banksy were already dead, but the public did not know it? Could production continue? Could works be sold, authenticated, and enforced as “Banksy”? And what legal, ethical, and market complications would arise if a collective or administrative structure continued to operate under the assumption of a living artist?
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