National Post (National Edition)
STREET SMARTS
Scruffy, rude and now worth more than $100m — how did graffiti on buildings and rail cars go from anti-establishment protest to gallery catnip? Alex Diggins
Dublin City Council certainly knows how to pick its battles. In February, it announced it was taking a street-art collective to court over their work. The offending artwork was a sunny mural of David Attenborough, made to commemorate his 93rd birthday, and featuring the beloved British broadcaster smiling benignly among a colourful thicket of plants and birds.
The council also took issue with further pieces done by the group. These outrages to public taste included a painting celebrating the city's traditional horse fair, as well as an anodyne design marking Mental Health Awareness week that invited passersby to “Think and Wonder/ Wonder and Think,” both also drawn onto walls. The collective claimed they had permission from the buildings' owners or occupiers. But the council was unmoved: the pieces, it argued, were a breach of planning law.
Street artists, of course, have long tussled with the authorities over their right to expression — and to avoid being erased. In 2008, workers from a London borough whitewashed over an image of two girls playing with bullets, hours after it was believed to have been painted by Banksy. In fact, Banksy hasn't had much luck with zealous bureaucrats: in 2014, councillors in Clacton-on-Sea in eastern England ordered the removal of an artwork depicting pigeons holding anti-immigration placards after residents complained it was racist. Yet, last year, the same council hired a security guard to protect a stencil of a boy fishing for a face mask because it looked like a Banksy — despite the fact the artist did not officially claim it.
This volte-face underlined the tensions central to street art today: is it cultural heritage or petty crime? And, as graffiti moves into the galleries, is it in danger of losing its countercultural cachet?
“We always thought at some point it would become a movement,” says Charles Uzzell Edwards, a graffiti artist who founded one of Britain's first street-art galleries, Pure Evil, in 2007. “In the Pompidou Centre bookshop, there's now a street-art section alongside a Surrealism section. Auction houses are interested in street-art because it's selling for a lot of money. It's become a worldwide thing.”
At its simplest, graffiti is an assertion of presence — I tag, therefore I am. Certainly, that's the impulse behind much of the 11,000-plus pieces scratched into the ruined walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum, some of the earliest examples of urban graffiti. They're a marvellous window onto Roman society: electoral slogans jostle with love poems, curses with recipes for fish-gut sauce. And, of course, there are more lusty male genitals than in a schoolboy notebook.
But were they considered art? It doesn't seem that way. Despite its historic prevalence, graffiti only began to be seen as “art” relatively recently. The first “tags” — a graffiti-artist's name, or more likely pseudonym — were sprayed onto the city walls of New York in the late 1960s. And by the 1980s, the city was plastered. Subway cars, train sidings, freight trucks: anonymous, depersonalized public spaces were particularly fair game. From the beginning, graffiti was a political act.
“These artists weren't doing it because they wanted a retrospective at the Tate,” Edwards explains. “They were doing it because they wanted to smash the system.”
The system, though, proved it could hit back. Driven by the “broken windows” theory of policing — which held that combating petty crime, such as vandalism, would reverse a broader instability — New York City authorities waged war on the taggers. Mayor Ed Koch authorized police to follow likely-looking youths, and frisk them for spray-paint cans.
But street art began to emerge from the shadows. Simple tags developed into “wildstyle” graffiti: vast, vibrant pieces that might stretch the length of a subway car. These were less intimidating to the public than the spiky, tangled hieroglyphics of tags. Individual street artists started to achieve commercial and critical recognition.
Among the most significant of these pioneers was Jean-Michel Basquiat. Born poor in Brooklyn and without formal art training, Basquiat initially went by the tag Samo — “Same Old Sh--” — spraying buildings in Lower Manhattan with anti-establishment relish. Despite sometimes sleeping rough, he mingled in clubs with the city's hard-living cultural elite, gaining entry into the “new wave” art world.
His dark patchwork canvases drew equally from African tradition, his childhood immersion in the medical textbook Gray's Anatomy and punkish energy of street art — and his star rose swiftly. He collaborated with Andy Warhol, and his work has since sold for more than $110 million. He died in 1988 of a heroin overdose, aged just 27, but by then his legacy was clear: street art could be lyrical and intelligent without frightening the horses, and — crucially — it would sell.
The clearest beneficiary of this legacy is Banksy. The semi-anonymous British artist — he has been periodically “outed” as a ex-public-schoolboy called Robin Gunningham — came up through the second wave of Bristol's street-art scene in the early 2000s. Using stencils for speed, his work was thought-provoking, witty and gently nose-tweaking.
“Banksy was appealing not to those inside the street scene, but to the outside world,” says Will Ellsworth-Jones, author of Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall (2012). “His images are ones we understand immediately. He's a clever artist.”
Banksy's success, though, is inseparable from another phenomenon — the rise of the internet. He was among the first graffiti artists to grasp that they had to live half on the streets, half online. After all, Banksy achieved early fame not only with stencils, but also a succession of stunts that recalled the Situationist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was filmed installing his paintings at galleries including Tate Britain, MoMA and the Met. And he painted a live elephant the same pattern as the wallpaper at a downtown gallery in New York, appalling animal-rights charities, but thrilling controversy-hungry gallerists.
“These days, people are photographing pieces before you've even finished them,” notes Edwards. “I'm a brand. Banksy is a brand. But we've also had our time going out and making art because it's fun and gets the adrenalin going. So if you lose that excitement, it's a bit sad.”
Has Banksy lost that edge? His style is now as ubiquitous and cosily British as Union Jack-stamped tea towels. And his work commands the kind of prices that suggest a bubble about to burst. His “Girl with Balloon” was sold for $1.67 million Cdn in 2018. Yet when it was put up again in 2021, it commanded $31 million — despite the fact the artist partially destroyed it live in the auction house with a shredder concealed in the frame. He has become an elder statesman of the streetart scene: too successful to be truly avant-garde, but supportive of younger artists through schemes such as the Cans Festival in London and Dismaland, a pop-up art exhibition in the form of an apocalyptic theme park, in Weston-super-Mare, southwest of Bristol.
* But above all, he has helped to shepherd street art towards mainstream acceptance. And public attitudes appear to have changed for good. Graffiti is no longer seen as a symptom of social malaise; instead, around the world, many authorities tolerate it as a harmless — if occasionally unruly — outlet for creative anti-establishment energy. Melbourne and Miami have “graffiti lanes” that are given over to street art. And Lisbon's city council organizes street-art tours, encouraging tourists to spend money in poorer neighbourhoods they wouldn't otherwise visit. Indeed, some now see it even as a harbinger of gentrification, as developers commission the same artists whom they're rapidly pricing out.
Yet despite inflated prices, internet hype and toothless Banksy knock-offs, Edwards is confident that for a younger, unknown generation, spraying away in our cities every night, the essence of street art — scruffy, unsanctioned and just beyond the law — remains unchanged.
“A moon rock is amazing, but if you take it off the Moon, and put it on a shelf, it's pretty boring. And it's the same with putting street art in a gallery. But there will always be great new artists. And there will always be kids with cans out there trying to reclaim the streets.”
A MOON ROCK IS AMAZING, BUT IF YOU TAKE IT OFF THE MOON ... IT'S PRETTY BORING.