I’m the Accidental Owner of a Banksy

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/im-the-accidental-owner-of-a-banksy.html

by c0riander • 13 years ago

189 168 13 years ago

That's terribly comical, considering it's just a graffiti piece. Banksy will find the fuzz it creates hilarious, I'm certain. Actually, the reactions it creates could be seen as the much grander art performance, compared to his previous 'art sale' [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX54DIpacNE

next89• 13 years ago

Yeah, it is really comical, but it's not "just" a graffiti piece, the same way that the painting of the Campbell's soup can it's not just a painting of a Campbell's soup can, or football is not just 22 guys chasing/transporting a ball. You have to look at the context.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

What an effective display of the issues I have with art.

Only a few people want these pieces, they are worthless in a vacuum. Only when shown in the context of "These pieces are by legendary artist banksy" do they become valuable treasures, in great demand.

It distresses me the number of things on this planet that are valuable because people think they are valuable, not because they have any actual use.

I suppose their value is in manipulating others. That is a form of utility, I admit.

voltagex_2• 13 years ago

I think they make the city more interesting, and hopefully they inspire some taggers to transition from a name-writer to an artist.

alexleavitt• 13 years ago

This is the entire underlying message of Banksy's film, Exit Through the Gift Shop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop

arrrg6• 13 years ago

What’s your definition of “no use”? I’m quite confused by that. When I was last walking through a museum I felt tremendous joy and very much loved looking at everything. That’s a use, right? That makes those are pieces useful. It should be quite obvious that things capable of doing that acquire value.

Sometimes that gets a bit ridiculous but a blanket claim that art has no use (or, even more specifically, that Banksy’s art has no use) seems equally ridiculous.

yetanotherphd5• 13 years ago

It took ten minutes of reading articles and comments to convince myself this was real and not a joke. You can't make this stuff up:

"A scuffle broke out at the scene of Banksy's latest piece in Williamsburg as a building manager and bystanders manhandled a vandal who tagged over the piece [of graffiti]."

"The building manager grabbed him and threw him down and was calling the cops, but the guy bolted"

fennecfoxen• 13 years ago

To be fair, Banksy put up something good-looking, and the vandal put up his tag. If you caught someone putting the latter anywhere, grabbed him and called the cops, I'd say you're probably on the right track.

It's got more in common with "graffiti on a tasteful outdoor mural" than with typical graffiti-on-graffiti.

mjn• 13 years ago

People tend to have those reactions even for stuff much less famous than Banksy. There is a bunch of artistic graffiti stuff painted all over the temporary walls around metro-station construction sites in Copenhagen, and it's frowned on to paint them over with just a tag.

yetanotherphd5• 13 years ago

I'm just going to quote from the comments section of [1]:

theoddfather: Already dissed? Jesus, why are people so ghetto?

bronxflash: how is that 'ghetto?'

theoddfather: Tagging is ghetto bullshit with no redeeming social or artistic value. It's garbage and obviously in this case was meant to simply deface something that clearly has a great deal of value to many people.

bronxflash: while i appreciate the fact that you said 'tagging' and not the all-inclusive 'graffiti,' tagging was the foundation in the early seventies of an entire visual aesthetic that came to be related to the explosion of urban culture; hey, it had to start somewhere and it started with tagging. graffiti was at no point in its origins exclusively 'ghetto': white kids on the upper west side, in south brooklyn, and the east bronx all did graffiti. maybe more kids in the hood did it, because not everyone had the same social outlets by way of moeny and power and social status. banksy wouldn't even exist without what filtered out of upper manhattan and the southern bronx and was known as 'tagging.'

[1] http://gothamist.com/2013/10/17/banksy_bed_stuy.php

dbond2• 13 years ago

Banksy most likely doesn't care about them being vandalised, he still gets to make his point and picks up the publicity beforehand. The interesting part is that by tagging over them others could actually be hurting new york, Banksy pieces have been known to attract visitors (as with the one in east new york) and may even increase property values (though never proven).

On the other hand, the residents may just appreciate the artwork and not consider it to be vandalism, but some guy scribbling over it because "this is his turf" is. Usually pieces tend to remain intact for quite a bit longer but ny vandals seem to have taken a dislike to him. If they actually responded with art (King Robbo[0] as an example) I'd call fair game, but scribbling a quick tag is just vandalism.

[0] http://twistedsifter.com/2012/01/banksy-vs-robbo-war-in-pict...

nikatwork5• 13 years ago

Traditional writers dislike Bansky because he is seen as a hipster cashing in on hiphop culture without living a hiphop lifestyle [1].

They also dislike stencil art in general, as it takes far less technical skill and practice to execute. Again, this is seen as yuppie kids ripping off authentic street culture.

The most offensive way to express dislike is to cross out or tag over someone's piece.

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Elements+of+H...

radley5• 13 years ago

Graffiti is art. Tags are just dogs marking territory.

iamben5• 13 years ago

Mayor Bloomberg's reaction is interesting - I'm curious to know when a person transitions from vandal to artist. I don't think anyone could argue that Banksy hasn't cemented a place in the 'history of art' and the books our children read that cover this period will feature his work.

In the UK a lot of people are genuinely gutted when a Banksy gets removed or covered - like something (a gift?) has been removed from the community. People who have their buildings 'vandalised' are often incredibly proud. But at the end of the day, it's still graffiti, still vandalism and I can understand Bloomberg's zero tolerance attitude. I wonder how he'd feel if it was on a building he privately owned (not that he needs the money...)?

mhurron• 13 years ago

'm curious to know when a person transitions from vandal to artist.

When they stop vandalizing.

ianstormtaylor• 13 years ago

Nah, they aren't mutually exclusive.

alex_doom• 13 years ago

This guy has paid for his copy of WinRAR

Millennium2• 13 years ago

I'm curious to know when a person transitions from vandal to artist.

When they start asking for permission before painting other people's stuff.

pippy3• 13 years ago

In most cases Banksy doesn't ask for permission.

foobarbazqux7• 13 years ago

The job of an artist is to break the rules.

lvs• 13 years ago

That's a bit stuffy. I'd be honored to have Banksy paint my stuff without permission.

lifeformed4• 13 years ago

I don't see why they couldn't be both. They're a vandal when they do it without permission on someone's property. They're an artist when they decide they're doing it out of creative expression. That doesn't necessarily mean they're automatically a good artist, but an artist nonetheless.

VLM• 13 years ago

The curious other part of the story is watching the train wreck of someone transitioning from a real estate owner to an art owner suddenly without any idea what they're doing or any plan.

The article is seeping thru with "I have no idea what it means" and so on. Well, what it means is you are not an art owner-type but are suddenly an art owner anyway, so you'd best sell that shack or otherwise get rid of it or remove it from the owners control before screwing it up, probably permanently and certainly very publicly.

The story wouldn't read any differently had someone tied a cow to her fence and run off. "I'm the accidental owner of a heifer" and "I have no idea what it means". Well, you're not going to figure it out quickly so use the magic of the market to hand it off to someone who does know what to do.

Its a popular, overdone trope, think of all the hollywood sequels along the lines of "three men and a baby".

pippy3• 13 years ago

The line to me is clear - tagging is vandalism, but if it exists to send a message it's art. A high level of skill is required to make art, either aesthetically or emotionally. Of course there is the grey area where a tag can be so well done you're questioning if it should be in a gallery, but by then the artist has built up a large repertoire of skills.

iamben5• 13 years ago

I think you're probably correct - and as I said, I think the 'man on the street' attitude in the UK right now would very much be that Banksy is an 'artist' rather than a vandal. I suspect this has a lot to do with an enormous amount of very favourable national press coverage.

Volpe• 13 years ago

By that definition, tagging an (original) poem is art?

nikatwork5• 13 years ago

You realize most writers start as taggers? It's part of the learning process. Everyone's a toy when they start out.

Apofis• 13 years ago

Nearly everything is art... that's the thing... art is a category. Something doesn't have to be good to be art. Something doesn't even have to have a message to be art. A big black rectangle painted on a canvas, while not considered very good by most, is still art.

thibauts• 13 years ago

Writers used to have some untold rules. Nevertheless tagging / grafiti is at its core, and before being an art form, a subversive means of expression for people that usually are invisible.

Why do you think writers use names like ads ? This is a quest for identity by people that have essentialy been made transparent and ignored by society. They reclaim urban space. "This is mine too, it has my name on it". "You can't do as if I didn't exist".

Being the target of such vandalism is no fun, for sure. I have been. When I did, I tried to remind myself tags are scars forgotten kids draw into average and blind people's landscape.

In this world of writers Banksy is a pacifist. He's addressing average people in their own language. He's talking to us with subtlety and good points, he's touching us, instead of shouting on us.

Be it him or any other writer, don't kill the messenger. If tags are pimples, then our society is sick. Would removing the symptoms cure the disease ? I doubt it, and I guess you do too. We know this all too well for a long time but still don't act on it as a group. These are only reminders, or first symptoms, of what is to come if we continue to indebt ourselves to other human beings. They'll reclaim.

theoh• 13 years ago

Well, most art critics don't take Banksy seriously, so I wouldn't count on him having a place in the history books any more than a novelty musician like Weird Al, for example. In fact that comparison makes Banksy sound more important than he is. David Blaine, maybe? http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/20...

lclarkmichalek• 13 years ago

If not in art history books, he'd have a place in anthropology history books, simply due to the vast differences in the way people perceive his work, and the conversation (furore in some cases) that it causes.

andrewb• 13 years ago

I made a recent trip to NYC and visited several museums and Five Points. I was more impressed by the artwork by the graffiti artists than the majority of items at say MoMA PS1.

Unfortunately, I think graffiti art will be accepted one funeral at a time.

iamben5• 13 years ago

He makes the contemporary/2000s artist pages in a number of the generic art books I've picked up over the last few years. Although I can't claim to be any kind of a critic.

[Goes to play some Weird Al on Spotify ;-)]

radley5• 13 years ago

Don't take critics too seriously. Nobody here can name a single critic. But we all know Banksy.

JamesArgo2• 13 years ago

It’s funny he contrasted Banksy with Pollack. I’ve always thought of Pollack (and many other modern artists) as a sort of charming guy who figured out that the art industry is a weird product of status games and so decided to create positional goods with the least amount of effort possible.

brady747• 13 years ago

I'm guessing critics are often historically wrong about the importance of various artists. How are you determining most of them don't take his work as value additive? Why do you accept their opinion as valuable?

Also, for reference, My wife is an Art History Professor at a highly respected liberal arts college and she takes Banksy seriously.... though she would not want to be called a critic.

Disclosure: owner of a Mr. Brainwash original

ecocentrik• 13 years ago

It looks like art criticism is pretty much dead so I wouldn't look to them for an opinion. "There Are Fewer Than 10 Full-Time Art Critics in the U.S." http://galleristny.com/2013/05/there-are-now-less-than-10-fu...

jayvanguard• 13 years ago

Most people don't take most art critics seriously, so there is also that.

80• 13 years ago

Critical reception is far from the strongest metric for seeing which artists are going to stick around. "Who's buying his work" is a better question to ask.

saurik• 13 years ago

Why can't vandalism be an artistic medium? I don't see any reason why someone can't be labeled both "vandal" and "artist". (edit: re-reading my sentence an hour later, I think even better wording might be "an outlet for artistic expression" rather than "an artistic medium".)

radley5• 13 years ago

It's only vandalism to those who want to control the city yet not participate.

DalekBaldwin• 13 years ago

Remember when Karlheinz Stockhausen called 9/11 a great work of art?

harryh• 13 years ago

Mayor Bloomberg's reaction is obvious.

If he says the city condones Banksy's work then he's going to immediately get asked "Who's job is it to decide which graffiti is art and which will get you arrested?" He's got 10,000 more important things to deal with so he just says it's vandalism and will be treated as such and then moves on to the rest of his day.

ojbyrne2• 13 years ago

I found this interesting to compare/contrast:

"For $41 million — what Citibank paid to sponsor the program for five years — our city bikes became Citi Bikes. To make certain you don’t forget this fact, a Citi Bike sign hangs in front of the handlebars, Citi Bike is printed twice on the frame, and a Citi Bike billboard drapes the rear wheel on both sides. The font is the familiar Citibank font and the Citibank signature decoration floats over the “t.” There is no way to see a Citi Bike without thinking Citibank. The 6,000 bikes so far rolled out, of a possible 10,000, and their signs are a Day-Glo cobalt blue that you see on banks. Nobody wears this color. Nobody paints his or her apartment this color. This blue is bank blue."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/opinion/sunday/color-me-bl...?

justinpombrio• 13 years ago

I'm curious to know when a person transitions from vandal to artist.

Asking for a transition point makes the assumption that they are mutually exclusive. But Banksy is by any reasonable definitions both a vandal and an artist. Hence Bloomberg is simultaneously cleaning up vandalism and destroying art. Whether you think this is a good thing depends on how you weigh these two aspects. Personally, I think it just makes his work more precious. It is the nature of the medium that his work is temporary.

iamben5• 13 years ago

I agree with you completely. But there's a mindset needed from most people before they make the jump from 'vandal' to 'artist' - or vandal artist! There are a lot of graffiti artists doing fantastic pieces - but it'll always be seen as vandalism.

With Banksy a lot of people (certainly in the UK) don't even think of the vandalism, they jump straight to artist - something they probably wouldn't do for a lot of other graffiti. Why so? Publicity? Celebrity sales? The fact the piece has immediate value?

mcantelon4• 13 years ago

Banksy is adept at leveraging the Streisand effect.

epo• 13 years ago

You badly misunderstand something. The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence whereby trying to minimise attention actually increases it. "Banksy" has known all along that maintaining the mystique of secrecy would create attention where otherwise there would be none. So the exact opposite of the Streisand effect. His secrecy is to create attention, not avoid it.

brenschluss2• 13 years ago

But at the end of the day, it's still graffiti, still vandalism

It's not vandalism if the owners of the buildings are happy to have the piece.

If I scrub a brick wall clean, is it vandalism? No.

If I glue a solid pound of gold to a brick wall and the building owner takes it, is it vandalism? No.

If I have a work painted on my property that draws crowds and will probably have a "market value" of a lot of money, and I'd rather have the work have been painted than not exist, is it vandalism? No.

If I'd be happy or even would actively desire to have a Banksy piece painted on my property, is it vandalism when it does happen? No.

qq66• 13 years ago

If the building is in public view, local ordinances may require certain displays (obscene displays, tobacco advertisements, etc) to be covered.

rolandukor• 13 years ago

yes, but you cannot assume that 'the owners' are all happy. Some may be but some may not be. I probably wont be. For those who are happy, fine; but for those who aren't, I would struggle to see how that wont be characterised as vandalism.

iamben5• 13 years ago

If I scrub a brick wall clean, is it vandalism? No.
If I'd be happy or even would actively desire to have a Banksy piece painted on my property, is it vandalism when it does happen? No.

Haha, reminds me of when Banksy would turn up in a van and overalls in the middle of the day, whitewash a wall and then stick up a 'Designated Graffiti Area' sign.. The wall would be covered a few days later... :-)

http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/photos/banksy_designated.jpg

3pt14159• 13 years ago

I tried to find out the owner of a commercial building that was Banksied in order to buy a cut out of the wall from him, but by the time I had gotten anywhere the work had been overtagged :(

drcode• 13 years ago

HN, please don't feed the trolls, even if they're PR-hungry artists.

mcantelon4• 13 years ago

HN is interested in the indivudal or collective knows as Banksy as he/it successfully hacks mainstream culture with critical messages.

michaelwww5• 13 years ago

Your language exhibits a bias that says: a) Banksy is a culture hacker b) Banksy is outside mainstream culture c) Banksy is a successful hacker. All of that is arguable, but one thing we can say for sure is Banksy is interesting because people are interested in Banksy - famous for being famous like Paris Hilton.

brunoqc• 13 years ago

"No. 17 will forever be ours"

imho art like this belongs to the city.

NamTaf2• 13 years ago

They were, confusingly, referring to 'No[v]. 17'. The prior sentence refers to a new day coming, which is 'No[v]. 18'. I have no idea why they didn't go with the accepted abbreviation of November as 'Nov'. They weren't referring to building number 17.

Just clarifying, not disagreeing with your statement :)

fotbr• 13 years ago

I have no idea why they didn't go with the accepted abbreviation of November as 'Nov'.

Perhaps because they're talking about October?

e28eta• 13 years ago

It means the #17, as in the 17th painting by Banksy, as the article says early on.

cowsandmilk• 13 years ago

everything in the article suggests they are looking to preserve this piece, not take it away from the city, I'm not sure where you believe your disagreement comes from, considering the inherently ambiguous definition of "ours". Thus far, the owner is out of pocket for security guards to protect the piece after someone vandalized it. In fact, most of Banksy's pieces have been vandalized, so sadly, it seems security is needed.

robabbott• 13 years ago

First-world problem...

danielharan• 13 years ago

"Will it make us money?" and describing this as "our plight" are wrong-headed and hilarious, but par for the course in a city where the mayor doesn't see the beauty in such art.

confusedev• 13 years ago

Just enjoy it.

lifeformed4• 13 years ago

The whole "high-art = big money" mindset is what ruins everything. Just let it be. It's an image that people enjoy looking at, and it's right there for everyone to see - touchable, fragile, transient. Giving it a monetary value defeats the whole purpose of it. It's not meant to be preserved, it's just a curio that livens up the outdoor scene.

Stop valuing it so much - it's meant to be weathered and destroyed. Enjoy the art for what it is and let urban nature take its course.

dionidium• 13 years ago

This is one of those things, like complaining that the developer of a webapp you like "sold out" to a large company, that sounds nice unless it's your app with an offer or your building that just got tagged by Banksy. The owners of this building didn't assign the value; they inherited it. In any case it would be plain dumb to ignore it and I have no idea why anybody would upvote a comment suggesting that they do so.

Amadou• 13 years ago

it would be plain dumb to ignore it and I have no idea why anybody would upvote a comment suggesting that they do so.

I upvoted it because I was going to write essentially the same thing.

I've been thinking about it since Colbert publicly non-invited Banksy to paint the wall outside his studio. I don't believe that dollars are an appropriate unit of measurement for life experiences. I do believe that graffiti and others forms of street art are intentionally impermanent and functions of their location.

I would support trying to sell it if the building owners were living hand to mouth, but that's obviously not the case. The author's already monetized the "inheritance" by selling a literary "piece" to NY Magazine. She doesn't need to sell it so leaving it as part of the gestalt the artist created is the greater good. If it gets defaced by some other graffiti artist or the police/Bloomberg (who are only feeding the frenzy with their attitude) then so be it, the limited lifespan of graffiti is an inherent part of the art. Like making sandcastles.

I would probably set up a hidden video cam in case someone else came along and tried to steal it. Not that the stealing is necessarily a problem for street-art, but taking it would involve damage to the building itself and that would be unacceptably outside the scope of screet-art.

lifeformed4• 13 years ago

My comment isn't direct at the individual in this article; I don't blame them for what they did. I just was thinking the whole culture that's evolved out of this is kind of annoying. Our society had the opportunity to just enjoy some cool images, but turned it into some stupid meta-drama.

The whole point of these works is to bring out this drama and highlight the absurdity of it all. It's not absurd in the sense that people are acting irrationally, but absurd in how our culture treats art as some mystical thing that has to be set on a pedestal behind protective glass. We've elevated "art" into something that supposedly only highly-cultured people can appreciate, and shut it away from the layperson.

By doing his art in the cheap and fragile form of graffiti, intimately accessible to everyone, he's giving art back to the people. It's just a simple creative expression for a creator to enjoy sharing. Yet, as Banksy surely predicted, we've tried to apply our weird notions of art onto it, that it should be locked up, cut out of the wall, sold for millions, viewable only to the elite.

There's no easy way out, because no individual is incentivized to change, yet society as a whole needs to change.

skue• 13 years ago

Giving it a monetary value defeats the whole purpose of it.

And what if the purpose is the absurdity of its monetary value?

I don't believe that Banksy's goal is to have his work be seen as curios. It's getting us to have these conversations.

lifeformed4• 13 years ago

I agree, and I think the message is clear: we've perverted what people call "high art". To paraphrase another post I made, we've raised "art" on a pedestal behind protective glass, as something that supposedly only highly-cultured people can appreciate. We've applied this perversion to Banksy's graffiti in a very ironic way:

People want to preserve the paintings, even though they're intentionally transient. They want to cut them out of the wall, even though the environmental context is critical to the piece. They want to sell them for tons of money, even though it's been freely given in a public space, for everyone to appreciate.

In short, people want to destroy the whole artistic value of the piece in order to increase the monetary value. I guess all that remains is the meta-message that predicts this outcome.

joe_the_user2• 13 years ago

The whole "high-art = big money" mindset is what ruins everything. Just let it be. It's an image that people enjoy looking at, and it's right there for everyone to see - touchable, fragile, transient.

I agree but I'd like to point out that Banksy is as much a part of the "high-art = big money" as the galleries and the press.

baddox• 13 years ago

I don't understand your attitude. Money is a very good way to genuinely quantify the value of something. Putting a dollar amount on a piece of art means people do enjoy looking at it for what it is. Unless you're defining "value" in some manner unfamiliar to me, you can't say "enjoy it" but "stop valuing it."

markost• 13 years ago

But don't you see, you're missing the entire point. Banksy is a graffiti artist. At no time have any of his works been capable of being bought or sold. His graffiti has routinely been lost, painted over, weathered, or ignored. That is the whole point of his work. Not only that, but often the point of his work is to devalue some other seemingly valuable thing--witness his Ronald McDonald statue[1].

Just because some rich people feel like attaching monetary value to most art doesn't mean Banksy's art has to fall in line. It's not like you're going to take down a section of wall and sell it, and someone did, he would also be missing the entire point.

Just be happy that cameras exist and take a picture.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8886934.ece/ALT...

wazoox• 13 years ago

Value in art comes from excess of money in too few hands. Much too rich people need investment vehicles, and because of this sad state of the matter art, collectible cars, London flats and many other rich toys get ridiculously expensive, completely disconnected from any sense of utility or real value of any sort.

Theodores2• 13 years ago

If the mayor was serious about catching Banksy then he would go to the phone companies and get all of the phones that were within a 200 metre radius on the night that the artwork went up for each and every piece. Then he could put them in a database, get his 'SQL for Dummies' book out and select just the phone records that are common to all incidents.

He can then go back to the phone companies and get the billing details for Banksy and his entourage. He could also ask them to let him know exactly where they are, follow them and catch them red handed doing their next piece.

Personally I see Banksy as a cartoonist rather than as a graffiti artist. He does not have a formal arrangement with the papers to syndicate his work, he does not even have to churn something out every day. Instead he gets his work prominently shown in all of the British papers, reaching an audience that no other cartoonist can. He has Robin Hood grade street cred. due to this audience reach.

Whereas other cartoonists use pen and paper, Banksy uses the side of some house or another wall as the medium. It is an intermediate form much like the conventional cartoonist's paper is. Although of value to the crazies that go mad for such things it is of no value to Banksy if his aim is to get his work into the paper, to reach a mass audience.

As for the people who have inherited the work, they could just let the boring 'tag' graffiti artists vandalise the Banksy masterpiece as quickly as possible, whilst there is still the media interest. It will then be known that it has been destroyed and the troublesome visitors will cease to turn up. They can then paint it over, to restore their property back to normal and get on with life.

Getting back to the mayor, if the trick works for catching Banksy then it will probably work for all of the inane tagging losers out there. So long as citizens report new tag-vandalisms in a timely fashion then the police should be able to get a reasonable sized list of phone numbers to work with.

I have known and known of 'tag' graffiti artists in my time. I still don't see why they are so determined to do what they do and for so late into adult life. I feel sorry for them not having any meaning to their 'art'. The strangest thing to me are the 'tags' put up in some foreign town. Imagine going to another country, a place you do not live, just to paint your tag up on some walls that you are not going to see again.

With a Banksy it cannot be said to truly exist until the papers report the new birth. With small time tedious tagging types they get Facebook instead of the media to show off their efforts. Invariably those that tag post their tags online somewhere. The phones can lead the authorities to where this is and get the evidence needed for prosecution.

kbenson• 13 years ago

Requesting personal information is what warrants are for.

Denying overly broad warrants that infringe on many people's privacy in order to catch one person who is hurting no one and rather than costing the city is possibly generating value from thin air is what judges are for.

x7z42zg4y• 13 years ago

as someone who in her time did millions in "damage" to the rail network your average writer has decent opsec besides the fact they almost all use burner phones on a day to day basis. they wont take phones with them on missions. last thing you want is your phone to ring when your hiding from the transit police. (what banksy opsec is like IDK ) also stencils are for people that cant actually paint.

Theodores2• 13 years ago

"stencils are for people that cant actually paint."

That is a bit like saying that those that use a sewing machine for embroidery cannot sew. Or musicians that use a computer cannot perform live. Or writers that use word processors 'cant' use punctuation.

Banksy has a style, technique and message that makes his work his, and highly regarded by untold millions of people. People that do gormless tags (most graffiti 'artists') have just the tag.

There is a difference between art and craft. So what if you have learned the craft, i.e. how to hold a spray can, it does not make it art. There is more to it than that. You have to find a voice deeper than a tag.

'Opsec' is a confabulated word to describe 'trying not to get caught'. Obviously anyone committing a crime does what they consider prudent to not get caught. However, the intelligence level of a tag 'artist' is not that high, hence, when they do get caught there is invariably pictures of their tags on their mobile phone and facebook-instagram-whatever page. So, the HN reading you might be that clever at 'opsec' to not get caught, but, the rest of those taggers out there - fish in a barrel (if only the police didn't have such small fish to dry).

stevewillows• 13 years ago

That, or just Google it and see if Robin Gunningham flew into the country recently.

sharkweek• 13 years ago

I think my favorite one so far was his "art stand" where he was selling his original Banksy stencils for $60 -- I'm assuming these will likely start popping up in auction for quite a bit more.

I would have likely walked by a stand like that and assumed it was a scam. But if you had told me it was real and I could have bought one for $60 bucks, I would have tried to immediately buy them all.

http://instagram.com/p/fa_ndFq-3W/

cromulent• 13 years ago

Only 8 were sold, 4 to one guy to decorate his new home in Chicago. I bet he's happy.

zakarum009• 13 years ago

In my opinion, graffiti is a very temporal, fleeting art form. Enjoy it while it lasts, but it's impossible to preserve graffiti, especially from an infamous artist..

recroad• 13 years ago

If your family owns a building in NYC you're already rich. No idea why people would ask you that.

intelliot• 13 years ago

Who is Banksy? Is he Satoshi Nakamoto?

mathattack• 13 years ago

The whole Banksy craze tells me how much of the value in art is things being famous for their own sake. It isn't that it's art (or graffiti) that causes the problem (or value) it's that it's someone famous.

There is a story in NYC about the French embassy finding they had a Michelangelo in the lobby of their building. (It was there when they bought the building) Once they realized what they had (years later) then they had a problem. They couldn't sell, it, and it required security, so ultimately they gave it to a museum.

http://www.thearttribune.com/The-Cupid-attributed-to.html http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/a-statue-for-a-...

RockyMcNuts• 13 years ago

It's not graffiti, it's disrupting the entrenched fine art distribution incumbent oligopoly.

hacking is just like painting and all that - http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

I’m the Accidental Owner of a Banksy

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