Channel 4 is facing questions over TV show The Greatest Auction after emails revealed a dealer warned producers that art tentatively attributed to Banksy and sold for £250,000 was being billed as not genuine by a company involved in its restoration.
Jeff Salmon, an art collector who has appeared on a number of Channel 4 shows, was told he was not required at the filming of the relevant auction scenes on the primetime show after he pointed programme producers to the testimony of a firm that had managed the piece.
Salmon had offered to stand up during the filmed sale to denounce the “Banksy” as a forgery. This suggestion was rejected and Salmon, 70, was informed shortly afterwards that he would not be needed for the following day’s filming due to “a lot of last-minute changes”, he claimed.
The show’s producer, Curve Media, denied there was any link between Salmon’s comments to its chief executive, Camilla Lewis, and a decision to leave him out of the auction of the “Banksy” piece.
A spokesperson for C4 and Curve Media said: “Jeff wanted to stand up and stop the auction declaring the work to be not genuine. We already knew there were issues around the Banksy and that these were going to feature in the programme.
“Furthermore, the auctions are not produced and therefore Camilla explained his ‘play’ wasn’t appropriate. The information from Jeff was passed on to the production team who again looked into the work’s provenance but were unable to find anything beyond this small mention on that particular website.
“The production team spoke to a number of experts and could not get a definitive answer as to whether this was or was not genuine so the inclusion of the work in the programme was framed around the fact these pieces are selling for huge sums of money despite this uncertainty.”
The spokesperson added that the choice of dealers invited on the show “evolved” over the two weeks of filming.
They said: “When we reviewed the first week’s auctions, Jeff featured so heavily that it was decided we would not need him for that sale. Jeff was never booked to feature in the Banksy auction. In the finished series, Jeff appears in almost every episode and he has not been singled out in any way.”
During the programme, two on-screen dealers raised doubts about the accreditation of the work on sale to Banksy. The difficulty of being certain about the piece’s authenticity was discussed in the show commentary.
But the programme’s auctioneer described it as a “Banksy on the Greatest Auction” and Robin Barton, who subsequently successfully bid for the piece, responded saying he had taken comfort from a lack of claims of authorship from anyone else.
Immediately after the programme was broadcast, a street artist in Liverpool, known as Silent Bill, claimed he was the real creator of the piece, which was taken down from a carpark in 2016.
It has now emerged that, unknown to Barton, Salmon had also spoken to Lewis shortly before the sale.
Salmon had found the contentious art on a website of a company called Sincura, which was paid by a property development company in 2016 to remove it from the car park wall in Liverpool and to then manage its restoration.
Sincura confirmed it took the piece down and had restored it and that they did not believe it to be an authentic Banksy.
Salmon had informed Lewis in a phone call on 26 October 2022 that Sincura’s website was openly describing the piece as “not a genuine Bansky”.
“I said, ‘If you want to make television, I would be happy to stand up’, and she said, ‘No, no. This is our major piece, the major lot’,” Salmon said. “I said, ‘Fine do whatever you want with the information. Here is the site’. I guided her to the site and it was, ‘Thank you very much’. I was then later told I was not needed for the next couple of days. I was thinking, why not?”
After being stood down, Salmon emailed Lewis to express his concern.
He wrote: “To be frank, I am feeling victimised because of the information that I passed you yesterday. I sincerely hope that my not having been invited to today’s auction has nothing to do with that conversation.”
Lewis responded: “There is no correlation. So sorry for the inconvenience.”
Barton, a leading expert on Bansky’s work, told the Guardian he had not known about the claims on Sincura’s website ahead of the auction but that he did not believe he had been misled.
He said: “I believe there is enough doubt thrown on it that it is makes me nervous but I stand by the fact that until someone proves it is not Banksy it remains Banksy.”
The artwork was of a stencilled rat, a well-known Banksy character, alongside the words: “I never liked this Banksy”. It was one of a number accredited to Silent Bill in a self-published book of his art in 2017 and in a second book by artist John D’oh published by Tangent books in 2018.
