HISTORIC ONE-OF-A-KIND ORIGINAL WEBSITE DOMAIN REGISTRATION CERTIFICATE AWARDED TO BANKSY FOR HIS WEBSITE, “BANKSY.CO.UK.
The actual original domain name registration certificate for Banksy’s website, “banksy.co.uk” which was issued on March 4, 2002. Together with the original mailing envelope and terms and conditions insert. 12.75 x 9 inches.
PROVENANCE: From The Collection of Steve Lazarides and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity from Steve Lazarides. For over a decade, Steve Lazarides was Banksy’s agent and photographer, working with the artist as he grew from an unknown graffiti painter to arguably the most infamous artist on the planet. Speaking in his documentary, Under Duress: The Banksy Archive of Steve Lazarides reveals:
“I’d been into graffiti for a long time and I was hooked by the second image he [Banksy] showed me. He was using a political tool – the stencil, which up until that point I’d only seen used in graffiti in Czechoslovakia. It was a complete game changer.
His work had a message and it was funny. He had balls. He put his shit in places that other people didn’t go. The sheer volume of it. I was fully sold. Right away, I knew I’d do anything to help this kid.
He called me a couple of weeks later. He wanted a lift as he was picking up some screen prints of Rude Copper. He was going to take them to the anarchist book fair and sell them for a fiver. I told him not to do that, to sell them to me for £20 and then I’d sell them on for £50. Our partnership went from there.”
In an interview with Artnet News in 2014, Lazarides described his story with Banksy. “You look at what’s happened to Banksy and me and lots of other people,” he said. “If you’d sat down and written a script and taken it to Hollywood, we would have been thrown out of every single office for being too unbelievable.”
On his role in the street art legend’s success, Lazarides put it down to his job overseeing the commercial aspects of the art world that Banksy found uninteresting: “I think he always pursued his art as art. The sales really were only ever a secondary part of what he was doing. So he never had any interest in it whatsoever. It’s like the sales bit really was down to my side of things.”
Lazarides first met Banksy in Bristol in 1997 when he was assigned to interview the artist for the magazine Sleazenation, which was published monthly between 1999 and 2003. The pair hit it off and he went on to become the anonymous artist’s agent and gallerist. In 2019, Lazarides published a book of his behind-the-scenes photographs of life with Banksy, called Banksy Captured. The first edition of 5,000 books sold out within days and a second volume was published the next year. Included is a copy of Lazarides’ book, “Banksy Captured”.
