Banking on Banksy
Calling the enigmatic Banksy a “graffiti artist” is like calling George Bush a politician – there’s so much more to it than that – but it is on the street where he’s destined to make his biggest dent, Basquiat with a razor conscience.
I came across the Briton’s considerable fame while poking around in the art brewery at Juxtapoz Magazine, where he appears to enjoy god-like status, and was prepared to be dismissive until I popped into his own website, a brutally austere place that’s nevertheless packed with cool things, and read his “manifesto”.
This is in fact an excerpt from the account of a British soldier who was among the first to see the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II. The surviving prisoners were in in need of everything, yet some idiot had shipped them a crate of lipstick. Never mind, the writer discovered with awe as he watched spindly women die with their paint on, it was exactly what they needed to become human again.
Elsewhere Banksy offers advice to those who want to emulate him in adorning urban walls: “Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.”
Too clever by half, but who can resist his whimsical, neatly executed street stencils, or the fake paintings he surreptitiously hangs in posh galleries? I can easily do without the Banksy-was-here rat-logo T-shirts and tattoos, but travelling to record shops all over Britain secretively swapping copies of Paris Hilton’s debut album for doctored ones bearing slogans like “What use am I?” is a noble blow struck for humanity’s sanity.
Banksy has a few newspaper clippings on the site, which I’m pretty sure are not doctored. There’s one from the Evening Standard chortling about Tony Blair’ crusade against graffiti, which does seem every bit as vapid as Bush’s war on terror, even if less expensive.
“Trying to stamp out graffiti displays a single-minded meanness of spirit that is the hallmark of people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” it said. Gosh.
The Standard pointed out, too, that police efforts to stop the wall decor in New York had only forced the artists to work faster, with the result being “a desperate tide of chrome-and-black bubble letters blasted up in less than 60 seconds” in place of “the huge colourful frescoes that once lit up entire communities”.
“Do you want to live in a city that looks like it’s overrun by criminals,” it asked, “or overrun by artists?”
