The mysterious street artist Banksy is suddenly a little less mysterious. Although his likely true identity has been searchable online for more than fifteen years, a deep-dive investigation published by Reuters in March appears to have solved the case. (Banksy’s lawyer told the news outlet, simply, that his client “does not accept that many of the details contained within your enquiry are correct.”) The artist is unlikely to be pleased. In her New Yorker profile of Banksy, from 2007, Lauren Collins pointed to a quote from the artist on the matter of his anonymity. “I have no interest in ever coming out,” he once said. “I figure there are enough self-opinionated assholes trying to get their ugly little faces in front of you as it is.”

Fair enough. But Banksy has never been shy with his opinions, and always keen to get them in front of as many people as possible. In his cheeky guerilla public art, as well as his more traditional (though still quite wild) installations, the artist has created scenes of what Collins identifies as “anti-authoritarian whimsy”: Queen Elizabeth II as a chimp, Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, policemen locked in a kissing embrace, a protester throwing a bouquet of flowers. And rats, lots of rats. His black-and-white stencilled critters started appearing on walls around London in the early two-thousands, delighting pedestrians—even if the ideology behind them was decidedly un-delightful. “Like most people, I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together,” Banksy once wrote. “That all the vermin will get some good equipment and then the underground will go overground and tear this city apart.”

Collins’s profile captures the Banksy phenomenon before it went fully supernova. It came on the heels of his buzzy American début, a weekend pop-up show in Los Angeles titled “Barely Legal,” which drew a slew of celebrity patrons and featured a live elephant painted red and gold. But this was before his documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” from 2010, would make him a global household name. And before what is perhaps his greatest prank, when, in 2018, one of his paintings immediately began self-destructing after selling at auction, at Sotheby’s, for about $1.4 million. (The partially shredded art work later resold for more than $25 million.)

Even back in 2007, Banksy sounded a little worn out by the attention. Collins manages to exchange e-mails with the artist, who, with a note of self-deprecation, laments the difficulty of maintaining his secret persona. He writes, “A few days after the show in Los Angeles opened I was painting under a freeway downtown when a homeless guy ran over and said, ‘Hey—are you Binsky?’ I left the next day.”