Banksy’s Art and the Establishment

This morning I read a BBC article saying that Banksy’s relatively recent new piece of art that had appeared outside the Reading jail - depicting a prisoner escaping using a roll of paper and a typewriter - has been recently defaced. A blotch of red graffiti now covers the typewriter, with the words “Team Robbo” written below - a reference to another graffiti artist that had a feud with Banksy.

The articles written about this incident are filled with despairing comments from a wide array of individuals, ranging from a member of the public who attempted to wash off the offending red graffiti to a member of the Reading Borough Council who found it “disappointing,” as the borough had been looking to purchase the defunct prison.

What no one apparently realized was that Banksy’s works are acts of vandalism in the first place - no different from the graffiti that now covers it. The public’s reaction is the reaction to someone painting over a Mona Lisa. This is what happens when someone is enshrined within the hallowed halls of the establishment - all their works are placed on a pedestal and treated the same way as all valuable pieces of “artwork.” The piece of art is lifted out of its context, out of the dirt and dust and protected - and most importantly, assigned a monetary value. People respect it and want to protect it because it is now worth something, it can be monetized, and people are willing to spend money on it.

It’s not a mystery why the council member was so disappointed - the so-called vandalism of Banksy’s work has now drastically reduced the value of the venue they were trying to purchase. Similarly, the many people bemoaning this action has been cultured in such a way that they believe any “real” piece of art must be preserved in a museum and never interfered and interacted with. Even though I know very little about punk culture and graffiti art, I at least recognize that it isn’t something that was meant to be created and then displayed in a museum. The very action of creating graffiti art is anti-establishment, an act of civil disobedience. Just as the admiration of Western art music has become a ritual where we sit around silently, scowling at every cough and whisper in hushed concert halls, people pretend Banksy’s art was made by an artist and his apprentices in a 16th century atelier in Florence and not in the grungy streets of Reading.

The article and the people in it really shows how deeply ingrained this specific idea of art and beauty is within the modern world. Graffiti art can only be beautiful when it is represented the same way the Mona Lisa is - it needs a frame and a plexiglass case and a nameplate stuck to it for it to have worth. The ephemerality of the piece of art is seen as a drawback rather than an essential part of it, in our world where people throw up millions of dollars for a single piece of paper with paint on it drawn on by an artist from five hundred years ago.

What I’m trying to show here is the laughable attempt of the art establishment to appropriate graffiti art into its pristine, sterile walls. Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” art, “The Fountain,” an upturned urinal, was treated the same way. He must be rolling on the ground laughing at how people walk around nodding sagely at a freaking urinal with a signature on it. Not all art is meant to be admired the same way; some are meant to offend, others meant to provoke laughter. Others are dirty, earthly, and ephemeral - like Banksy’s works (and us humans). It’s way past the time we started to learn that there are different ways to experience art.