banksy

i quite like banksy. his work is clever, funny and sometimes has a wry political point to make.

his work was ephemeral glorying in the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of graffiti. that was until graffiti became art and something to invest in. so lots of guff spoken about how this banksy and that banksy was worth tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds even though they were painted on the side of a building.

not that it mattered much to banksy – he was coining it with his gallery work as dealers and collectors fought to buy his works. though it could be argued that the people who made the most out of banksy were all the people who did books, prints, canvases etc of his work.

to his credit banksy didn’t court publicity; he just went on about his art.

now i like graffiti. i have taken lots and lots of photos of it. i have mixed feelings about the worth of it. as it has become more mainstream and street/urban art has entered the galleries i find myself less inclined to listen to the posturing of street artists who claim that graffiti is not vandalism.

in some cases they are right. some of the works of graffiti artists such as roa, bortusk leer, kid acne, elmo, eska et al are wonders to behold. yet for each of these there are a bunch of kids who just tag their names in bright colours. you can tell when a graffiti artist has some sway in the graffiti community because their work stays untouched by others. perhaps that is why there was such an outcry recently when the new owner of a building painted over the banksy that was on it (since then it has been partially restored). me i couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about – it was not like it couldn’t have been replaced, it isn’t like the image hasn’t been reproduced elsewhere or saved for posterity.

in the end i guess it comes down to (as with most of the world) not all graffiti and graffiti artists are created equal. until such time as i can walk into a gallery like ‘stolen space’ or ‘pure evil’ and tag the works of the artist on display without them saying i defaced their work then the argument about it being vandalism is one that local councils have won.

meanwhile a much greater loss than a covered up banksy was the sad death of lucien freud. shan’t be long before the large scale retrospective opens in a gallery near me, it will be good.