On March 16, 2026, Reuters published the result of months of investigation: police records from New York, a name change, Ukrainian border protocols. This was not about uncovering a major corruption scandal or a war crime or anything of the sort. No, it was simply about finding out who was behind the artist name Banksy.

The journalists' justification for stripping an artist of his anonymity reads as if they wanted to do Byung-Chul Han the favour of illustrating the theses in his "The Transparency Society" as perfectly as possible:

"The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy's anonymity -- a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work -- has enabled him to operate without such transparency."

As justification for the effort the three of them undertook, this hardly suffices. It reads as if Banksy had held the world in suspense with his street art. It reads as if Banksy had been a threat to more than a few house walls.

But perhaps he was. How else could all this effort be justified?

Not with the rats and the girls with balloons, that much seems clear. Those were never particularly radical. What was radical was the refusal. For 25 years, one of the most influential artists of our time, worth millions, more popular than Rembrandt in British polls -- and nobody knew who he was. No interviews, no talk shows, no "Banksy x Nike". The art had long since become a commodity. Sotheby's, Christie's, millions. But the artist had not.

Han describes why exactly this is intolerable today. Why it cannot simply be left alone: "The imperative of transparency suspects everything that does not submit to visibility. Therein lies its violence." The logic is simple: what I cannot identify, I cannot control. And what eludes control is suspect. Reuters puts it in almost the same words: Banksy's anonymity had enabled him to operate "without such transparency". As if he had got away with something. As if he had been getting away with something. But what he may actually have been getting away with is evidently lost on these journalists.

Jean Baudrillard described in 1976 what makes anonymity so threatening. In "Symbolic Exchange and Death" he analyses the New York graffiti scene and concludes: the power of graffiti never lay in its content. It had none. Graffiti opposed the system not with names but with pseudonyms, not with identity but with indeterminacy. Their power, Baudrillard argued, lay precisely in the fact that they had no content and no message. The emptiness itself was the strength. The New York authorities panicked. Not because the graffiti were ugly or criminal, but because they couldn't categorise them. No political protest that could be answered -- or crushed. No art that could be exhibited. No criminality in the classical sense. Empty signs attacking the sign system itself. Even then, Baudrillard described how the system responded: the first step of co-optation was to call it "art" -- and thereby classify what resists classification. Banksy's works were understood as art from the start, but the "artist" was missing. The void remained. The system could swallow and process the images. What it could not process was the space where a civil name should have been. Without that name, the chain of commodification remains incomplete: no authorised catalogue raisonne, no retrospective, no brand collaborations, no estate, no biography. Everything was there except the citizen at the end of the chain -- the one who makes it all legible: taxes, liability, accountability. And as long as he was missing, there remained a hole at the centre of the market that was not supposed to be there.

There was yet another threat. As long as Banksy remained anonymous, a possibility stayed open that is not provided for in a hyper-individualised world: that "Banksy" is not a single person at all. That it is a collective. Several people producing together without anyone claiming the glory for themselves.

Perhaps this justifies the months of research better than any appeal to accountability. The journalists write it themselves: whoever influences public discourse should be unmasked. But this sentence contains two assumptions, both serving hyper-individualism and both in need of protection.

The first: everything must be individualised in order to be controlled. Influence needs a sender. Without an identifiable individual, no accountability, no liability, no commodification. For that, you need the bourgeois individual onto whom the art project Banksy can be reduced.

The second: that it is individuals who move the world. A name, a face, a biography, a genius. An anonymous collective that is more effective than most artists with names -- that calls into question not just the chain of commodification, but the entire self-conception. The unmasking closes this possibility. The genius narrative is saved.

And incidentally, so is that of the three journalists: their names now stand above the expose. Three individuals who spent months researching in order to identify an individual. That other street artists collaborated in the unmasking shows how deep the hyper-individualism runs. They too cannot accept that someone without a name is more effective than they are with one. The game perpetuates itself through the individuals.

The artworks remain the same. Not a single stroke has changed. They will continue to be photographed, continue to be auctioned for millions. Only now there may soon be a civil name in the auction catalogue. But the proof is gone -- that one can exist at the centre of the market without being captured by it. That influence without identifiability is possible. Perhaps that was the real artwork. Three journalists took a man's anonymity from him, only because they cannot understand that you can do something significant without having to "make a name for yourself".