In 2018 a painting of a girl reaching for a red balloon sold at Sotheby's for over a million dollars and then shredded itself inside its frame. This episode builds a narrative biography of Banksy, starting in the collaborative underground scene of early 1990s Bristol, where he painted freehand with the DryBreadZ crew, played goalkeeper for the Easton Cowboys, and produced a 1997 mural of a teddy bear lobbing an explosive at riot police. We examine the night he hid under a garbage truck from police, noticed a stenciled serial number, and adopted the technique that made his work fast, bold, and impossible to ignore.

From there we track the stunts that outgrew brick walls: the wallpaper-painted elephant in Los Angeles in 2006, the Princess Diana ten-pound notes, the Kate Moss prints that fueled the so-called Banksy effect at auction, and the s ...