Kerry Parnell: Banksy blunder among all-time career catastrophes
If you think you’re having a bad day at work, give a little bit of thought for the London Underground cleaner who removed artwork left by Banksy. But we all make mistakes right? Kerry Parnell takes a look back at some costly ones.
Opinion
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Bad day at work? At least you didn’t wash off a priceless piece of artwork. Pity the poor cleaner who this week scrubbed off a Banksy on the London Underground.
According to reports, the cleaner, part of a graffiti removal team, did their job a little too thoroughly when they erased artwork left by Banksy, of rats and face masks.
The world-famous street artist uploaded a video on Instagram of him spray-painting a carriage, in a white protective suit.
“If you don’t mask — you don’t get,” he wrote.
Don’t get is exactly what happened: cleaners had noticed “some sort of rat thing”, it later emerged, but Transport For London chiefs admitted the work was erased adding: “We’d like to offer Banksy the chance to do a new version of his message for our customers in a suitable location.”
I’m pretty sure that’s not how he works.
Considering Banksy’s recent piece of art given to Southampton Hospital is thought to be worth millions of dollars, it proved a costly error.
Although to be fair, it would have been difficult to sell a Tube carriage — imagine trying to display that above your fireplace.
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Everyone makes mistakes — I’ve made some blunders in my time, although they mainly involved mundane things such as spelling mistakes. I don’t suppose the poor cleaner
will ever forget how to spell B-A-N-K-S-Y.
Usually I wake up at midnight in a cold grammar sweat and fix it, which is not the case for Alitalia.
In 2006 the airline advertised business class flights from Toronto to Cyprus for $CAD39, accidentally leaving off the 00. They sold 2000 flights by the time they fixed it — costing them $7 million. Oops.
Or how about the curators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo who somehow snapped off Tutankhamen’s beard from the 3000-year-old funeral mask.
They took the ill-advised decision to bodge it back on with epoxy glue. It was eventually successfully restored by German specialists.
Then there was James Howells, an IT worker in Wales, who in 2009 was an early investor in Bitcoin and saved 7500 of them on a computer hard-drive on the off-chance they would ever be worth anything.
So it was unfortunate that in 2013 he accidentally chucked the drive in the bin. The collection went on to be worth at least $140 million.
James even tried to get his local council to filter through the landfill. If it’s any consolation to him, he could spend his imaginary fortune on the invisible Banksy.
Or he could go halves with the literary agent who rejected Harry Potter and instead snipped about J.K. Rowling’s stationery.
The author revealed she was rejected 12 times before Bloomsbury eventually published what turned out to be a truly wizard idea and the first was from an agent who sent a curt note simply saying, “My list is full. The folder you sent wouldn’t fit in the envelope”.
“I really minded about the folder, because I had almost no money and had to buy another one,” she said.
I bet that agent minds more — it gives a whole new meaning to foolscap.
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