Banksy’s Crude Oils, Twenty Years On - Jonathan Ludlow (CEO)

A boarded-up shopfront at 100 Westbourne Grove; a hand-lettered subtitle, “A Gallery of Re-mixed Masterpieces, Vandalism and Vermin,” and two hundred live rats negotiating a maze of plinths and gilt frames. For a few October days in 2005, Banksy staged a show that looked less like a gallery and more like a provocation in a laboratory. Inside hung hand-painted “crude oils”: canonical images repainted, redirected, or sabotaged, Monet’s lily pond clogged with shopping trolleys, Van Gogh’s sunflowers wilting as if bought at a petrol station, Hopper’s Nighthawks re-cast for late capitalism. The spectacle was perfectly calibrated: funny, abrasive, and impossible to ignore. It was also a hinge moment, when a street artist’s critique of taste, value, and environmental neglect stepped decisively into the art-historical canon and the market’s line of sight.

Banksy's Crude Oils (2005)

Crude Oils has often been summarised as a stunt with vermin. But the live rats, checked and cleared by environmental health officers after local complaints, were not only theatre; they were argument. The exhibition staged contamination, between “high” and “low,” between the white cube and the street, between modernist imagery and contemporary waste. If Dada turned salons into sites of nonsense and assault, Crude Oils revived that tactic for the 24-hour news cycle, speaking fluently in the language of parody and disruption to expose the soft underbelly of bourgeois taste. It is crucial to recall that these were not prints or stencils; they were oils, slow, traditional, historically freighted. Show Me the Monet (2005) is not simply a gag about shopping culture; it relocated Monet’s model of endless optical renewal to a world of irrecoverable waste.

Show me the Monet - Banksy (2005)

Likewise Sunflowers from Petrol Station strips Van Gogh’s devotional object of life and aura. The blooms sag, the vase feels temporary, the title is transactional, a purchase on the way somewhere else. If Van Gogh’s originals carry the metaphysics of looking (and of labour), Banksy’s version measures the half-life of desire once it passes through the pump and the point-of-sale system. When Christie’s later foregrounded the work’s 2005 debut within Crude Oils, it was to situate it at the exact intersection of art history and contemporary anxiety: the ecological and economic exhaustion beneath our inherited images.

Because the show so quickly became a legend, we forget its compression. It ran for roughly a week; admission was free; the room was small. The intimacy mattered. Viewers navigated the rats to get to the art, and in that choreography the exhibition proposed a diagram of the cultural field in 2005: spectacle, contamination, and complicity as everyday conditions. The rats were not merely Banksy’s mascot; they were the curators, determining how long you would look and how close you dared to stand.

Appropriation has an old and serious lineage, Duchamp’s urinal, Sherrie Levine’s photographs “after” Evans, Warhol’s serial silkscreens. Banksy’s intervention, however, is not the postmodern cool of citation; it is a re-painting that insists on craft while refusing reverence. He doesn’t borrow the image; he rebuilds it, and then introduces a vector of social damage, consumption, pollution, surveillance, that reorients the work’s symbolic economy. The “remix” language used by press and auction houses has always been slightly too casual: these are not mashups; they are propositions about what happens when a modernist faith in renewal meets the entropy of the early twenty-first century. There is also the matter of timing. Crude Oils followed Banksy’s first major works on and around the West Bank barrier earlier in 2005, where the political theatre of image-making was already explicit.

Sunflowers from Petrol Station - Banksy (2005)

Back in London, the show condensed several threads: institutional critique (what counts as a gallery), environmental alarm (Monet’s pond as sump), media literacy (the rats as headline architects), and the market’s appetite for provocation. Banksy didn’t just enter the gallery; he reframed it as a stage on which ethics, attention, and commerce collide.

The paradox has been rehearsed often enough to feel inert: anti-market art becomes the market. But with Crude Oils, the feedback loop is the content. The paintings operate as critiques of value creation while being exemplary engines of it. The auction records that followed, Show Me the Monet  foremost, did not neutralise the works so much as prove their thesis: that images, once devised as indictment, are swiftly recoded as luxury when the right forms of scarcity, authorship, and narrative attach. If anything, the tension between message and price is the fulcrum on which the paintings move.

Two decades on, what remains? First, the environmental text has thickened. What read as satire in 2005 reads as reportage now. Shopping carts in a water garden are no longer a wicked joke about consumerism; they are a standard image from any river clean-up feed. The oil spill is less metaphor than norm. In this sense Crude Oils was prescient, not opportunistic: it trained canonical beauty on the debris field. Second, the show supplied a legible model for how street-born critique could inhabit the gallery without being domesticated by it. The vermin, the free admission, the unfussy hang, all refused the pressure to turn critique into a brand experience. And yet the brand formed anyway, precisely because the show was so clear about its refusal.

Third, the paintings honour the paradox of appropriation while side-stepping its lazier traps. Where much late-twentieth-century appropriation art underscored reproduction, Banksy insisted on singular objects, with paint, linen, and frames, stubbornly analogue in an era tilting digital. That choice counts. It links the project less to the infinite reproducibility of pop and more to the one-off gravity of oil painting, so that when a Warhol motif reappears as Kate Moss, or a Vettriano ballroom scene dissolves into toxicity, the joke carries the weight of a medium that historically dignifies what it depicts. (Recent sales of these oils, Vettriano’s Crude Oil (Vettriano) among them, confirm that the market reads the move as canonical, not peripheral.)

Finally, there’s the question of shock—did Crude Oils exhaust it or renew it? In the mid-1990s, the YBAs had already tutored the public in provocation. What Banksy achieved in 2005 was not simple outrage but a more durable unease: the sense that contamination had become structure, not accident. The rats were not a sideshow; they were diagnosis. If Dada’s strategy was to estrange the bourgeois audience from its own certainties, Crude Oils updated the script: it estranged the canon from the conditions that now surround it, retail, refuse, and the liquidity of attention.

It is tempting to close with the market, because the market supplies neat endings: dates, prices, headlines. But the work’s staying power rests elsewhere. Crude Oils remains compelling because it treats art history not as a quarry for reference but as a living ecology into which we introduce new contaminants and see what blooms, sinks, or mutates. The lilies persist, but so do the trolleys. The sunflowers still face the viewer, but the pump hovers just out of frame. That the paintings have become valuable does not finally blunt their point; it completes it. The system that absorbs critique is the system the critique describes.

In 2005, you walked around a cramped room in Notting Hill, sharing air with rats, trying not to step on a tail while you squinted at a familiar image made unfamiliar. In 2025, you scroll past the same images on a phone, now requisitioned by museums, auction houses, and a dozen think-pieces on the culture industry. The distance between those experiences is the measure of Crude Oils’ success, and its warning. The show didn’t ask whether art could still shock; it asked whether we could still recognise shock once it was elegantly framed. The answer, then as now, is complicated. The rats are gone. The contamination remains.