Indeed, some of Banksy’s installments have been either painted over, or painted on, or tagged by other graffiti artists. The way the pieces are embedded into the city’s environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that just a day after the first Banksy went up, it was painted over; the piece was tagged, “(c) PHATLIPP Sweaty palms made me lose the love of my life ):” This one guy tagged a few pieces, which elicited more graffiti responses, these making fun of him, but also an outpouring of hate and vitriol on the Internet. (A representative comment from one commenter on Banksy’s Instagram: “Fuck those jealous losers that ruin your art. They are just mad that their ugly scribbles don’t get the attention you get.”) Even when more creative additions and replication went up as with Banksy’s, “Concrete Confessional”, people still felt affronted by what they perceived as defacing of art. That many people, en masse have taking to denigrating anyone who might think to tag, or add to, or otherwise “deface” a precious Banksy betrays a static and empty (though understandable) idea of art, an idea that undermines the greatness of graffiti. (...)
Graffiti art, let’s remember, is purposefully one of the less controlled and more transient of art forms. It is inherently communal, whether in the enjoyment or in its genesis and longevity. Performance art, of course, is more fleeting by definition, but both graffiti and performance art take away much of the control from the artist, whether limiting themselves in time or creating a painting that will necessarily be under the community’s control. Both though, tend to raise a strange frustration in people, perhaps because these forms so diverge from our traditional notions of art as eternal, as belonging in a museum. Graffiti takes the city as its canvas, the walls, alleyways, and windows of lived life, an intrusion of art into the stuffiness of the city, but always as part of the city. To then treat it as an objet d’art, to quarantine it off, transforms it and takes it out of its natural and proper context. Banksy once wrote, “Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.” But can you imagine the outrage if someone were to take a piss on or even next to one of the new Banksies?
In the last two weeks, owners of buildings with Banksy art have taken to hiring guards, putting up plexiglass, rolling gates, and ropes to create lines, all of which is practical and perhaps understandable but undermines much of the purpose of these 30 days. All of these protections simply turn these outdoors, public pieces into indoor museum pieces, introducing a sterility that subverts the spirit of the project. These tactics isolate the art from the bustling environment. The viewer becomes passive, just another viewer waiting in line, no longer a participant. From a theoretical perspective, this all seems backwards. The owners of the building, from the perspective of the actual graffiti art, ought to hold no more rights than the community in deciding what to do with the graffiti.
by Joe Winkler, Guernica | Read more:
Image: from Flickr via Dan Brady
