What should you do if you wake up with a banksy on your wall?

One morning, when Sam sent him a photo of a piece of graffiti that appeared on the outside wall in a house he had in Margate, he lay in bed.

Surprisingly, it seemed like a Banksy. Perhaps the Graffiti artist’s most interesting new work of art in recent years, Valentine’s Day Mascara (depicted above), will appear in Margate on 2023 Valentine’s Day.

Bamboozled, Sam Googled: What do you do when you wake up with a banksy on your wall?

“What did Google say about it?” I asked him.

“Nothing! And I have to contact the council, I have to find an art gallery that can advise me.”

Sam called Julian Usher at the Red Eight Gallery. Julian’s team promised that the new BankSy’s street cleansers, weather, rival graphite artists and other art sellers were immediately threatened by Margate in an hour: “We knew that we had to cover the piece, Jul Julian says.

And there was another reason that Julian has doubled: Banksy, if he chose your wall for one of his drawings, you may be serious in money.

For my second season BBC Radio 4 Podcast Banksy StoryWhen Banksy came to the city, I follow the very different fate of the two hosts who woke up to find a banksy on the walls one day. The season shows how important the graffiti has become for a local community and why people did not agree with so violently after discovery.

Sam, Valentine’s Day, which touched on the theme of domestic violence, became the hide of Mascara, and its events usually raised every Valentine’s Day. This is a complex job. Bludgeoned his wife, the housewife of the 50s with a black -eyed. It is a real pan feet with red stained and its painted legs rises to the real refrigerator freezer of Banksy’s wall. A broken plastic chair witnesses their war.

The day it appeared later, the garbage collectors came to the soul of the fridge freezer. This was a free collapse for everyone with the public help. It was a turmoil.

A Media Scrum, a Local Council with Wrong Foot, millions of global audiences. Exactly, one is a suspect, what Banksy wants.

And this time, only for laughter, the oil painter Peter Brown has granted the scenes behind. I talked to Pete “Sokak” Brown for the serim. “The whole reason for my work was Banksy’s questioning what art is.” “Is it about graffiti? Or is it a reaction later and what happens to it?”

As your chance will have, Pete was caught in the video as Banksy’s last touches on Valentine’s Day mascara – a video that the Banksy story managed to get. We can see that one of the Banksy team allows a local child to play with the drone.

“They devote time to teach a child how to fly a drone,” Steph Warren, who works with Banksy and emerged with the first series, says. “Very sweet!”

I follow the story of Gert and Gary with Sam. Like Sam, they didn’t want me to use their surnames. On the wall of their acquisition at Lowestoft in Suffolk, a seagull with a height of 30FT appeared one morning. The bird had to be large for Banksy’s ambitious visual beak to work. The artist pushed his big yellow insulation strips to jump that looked like a fast-food container he had immersed to steal the chips.

Banksy chose the wall well. Visitors from the train, the scourge of the coastal towns of the UK, equal parts warning and celebration of this humorous meditation was treated. Lowestoft Seagull was Banksy’s part of the Great British Staycation, a post -avoidance campaign to cheer us all with a summer holiday in England.

But Gerrt never cheered. “This is not a seagull, it’s an albatros!” He chewed when I went to interview him.

“How did you know that you were Banksy?” I asked.

GERT, “next to the house was planted. I tried to find out if there was a certain scaffold company, but there was no phone number.” “The agency that allowed me on Monday morning told me that I could be a banksy. Until then, the pier had gone and these seagulls appeared.”

This fits with what we know about Banksy’s Modus Operandi. He claims that hiding in a clear view is the best way to remain invisible. “If questioned about your legitimacy,” Wall & Piece wrote, “Just complain about the hourly rate.”

This is a good plug. But how fun is the other end of the spray for the people at the other end?

With good hustle and bustle skills, I saw that a bank can see that the bank balance has expanded, but this is not an easy process.

As GERT explained, bored, “Lowestoft people said that it belongs to Lowestoft … But nobody did not go out to say ‘we will help you protect it’. It does not belong to the person who filmed him or the person who takes pictures with his children. The problem is mine!”

GERT was trying to blame him for Perspex screens with people who put their children to jump for photography opportunities, and had to fight the threat of a protection order that could cost £ 40,000 a year.

And the two stories I followed had completely different results.

Both art works were removed from the houses they were painted – a complex, expensive operation using expert equipment – can be sold. However, even though Banksy in Margate is on the verge of selling over £ 1 million, the domestic violence costs £ 3,000 for months on the shore of a clan -controlled warehouse with a large pile of great piles to go to charity and for a predictable future.

GERT and his partner Gary, to protect the track, so far cost around £ 450,000, and although there are buyers who smell around, no one has yet to buy. Speaking about the situation, Gary told me: “I’m very angry at what’s going on.”

Not everyone approves people trying to sell Banksy’s street art.

In the first series of the Banksy story, Steph Warren-Endişe hosts, who played a role as the only person working for Banksy without signing the Bankruptcy agreement, shows “five liters of white emulsion and paint”.

Warren, the owner of Stelladore, the Street-Art Gallery in St Leonards, is a pure that thinks that the art for the street should stay there, regardless of the value. “It forms the basis of art with Banksy, or he says. He continued: “Remove the work on the streets where he puts the job and loses the workforce instantly. The context is everything.”

But Banksy has raised graffiti to a new form of art that has now made money – street art. Banksy’s signed prints can be sold for six -digit amounts. Graffiti or street art not only ages, but now a class of being. Considering this, how can any landlord feel good to rub a banksiya without feeling like you have smashed a Ming vase?

One thing I know for sure: If you wake up with a Banksy on your wall, you’ll have to make a series of smart decisions to get out of it. As Sam said, after two years have passed with Banksy circus, “Now it will be very boring to go back to normal life”.