BANKSY™ BALLOON TEE

Catalogue Note

Released through Gross Domestic Product in 2019, Banksy™ Balloon Tee represents Banksy's first official T-shirt version of one of the most famous images of his career: Girl with Balloon.

The design is wonderfully simple. Banksy's familiar little girl is screenprinted in black onto an otherwise plain white T-shirt. But the red heart-shaped balloon, the element that normally floats tantalizingly beyond her fingertips, has disappeared. In its place hangs an actual red heart-shaped pendant from a chain around the wearer's neck. Banksy takes one of his best-known two-dimensional images and completes it with a cheap piece of jewelry.

Or, as GDP rather magnificently advertised it:

This image has been the jewel in the crown of every Banksy bootlegger for the past 15 years, now the first official version comes with an actual jewel on it. Screenprint on guilt-free fair trade tee with pendant.

That sentence contains most of the joke.

By 2019, Girl with Balloon had travelled extraordinarily far from its origins as a stencil appearing on London's streets in the early 2000s. The image had been reproduced on prints, posters, postcards, mugs, phone cases, cushions and innumerable unauthorized T-shirts. It had become not merely a Banksy image but something approaching a popular logo—and therefore a particularly attractive target for counterfeiters and unofficial merchandisers. GDP turns that appropriation back upon itself. Banksy effectively produces the official bootleg of his own image.

The timing makes the work even more interesting. Gross Domestic Product was created partly in response to a trademark dispute surrounding Banksy's name and imagery. The artist explained that he was opening a shop following legal advice that selling his own merchandise could help demonstrate commercial use of the Banksy trademark. The entire enterprise therefore transformed the normally tedious machinery of intellectual-property law into an artwork about authorship, ownership and consumption.

Balloon Tee sits perfectly within that contradiction. An artist famous for allowing his images to circulate freely through public space suddenly finds himself manufacturing an officially sanctioned version of an image that everybody else has already been manufacturing for years. And he sells it for £35.

There is another typically Banksy detail: every shirt was XS. Whether practical inconvenience, fashion-world mockery or simply another deliberately dysfunctional GDP product, the restriction makes the object considerably funnier. Banksy's first official Girl with Balloon T-shirt was finally available to everyone—provided everyone happened to be extremely small...

The contrast between its original retail price and subsequent secondary-market value completes a joke Banksy could hardly have scripted better. An example retaining extensive original GDP shipping documentation later sold at Tate Ward for £8,750 including premium.

What began as a £35 joke about the commercialization of Banksy's most commercialized image consequently became an expensive Banksy collectible. In other words, Balloon Tee attempted to parody the commodification of Girl with Balloon and promptly became another commodity itself. For Banksy, perhaps there could hardly have been a more appropriate outcome.