Famous Graffiti Artist

Banksy is a well-known yet pseudo-anonymousEnglish graffiti artist, possibly named Robert Banks. It is believed that Banksy is a Yate native (near Bristol) who was born in 1974, but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and basic personal and biographical details. His artworks are often satirical pieces of art which encompass topics from politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti with a distinctive stencilling technique, has appeared in London and in cities around the world.

Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist in the late 1990s as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), often assisting writers Kato and Tes. In 1998 he arranged the enormous 'Walls On Fire' graffiti jam along with fellow Bristol graffiti legend Inkie on the site of the future 'Bristol' development. The weekend long event drew artists from all over the UK and Europe and his organisation of the event established his name within the European graffiti scene. By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a 'piece'. He claims he changed to stencilling whilst he was hiding from the police under a train carriage, and soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London.

Banksy's stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment or pro-freedom. Subjects include animals such as monkeys and rats, policemen, soldiers, children and the elderly. He also makes stickers (the Neighbourhood Watch subvert) and sculpture (the murdered phonebox), and was responsible for the cover art of Blur's 2003 album Think Tank.

In 2003 in a show called 'Turf War', held in a warehouse, he painted on animals. Although the RSPCA declared the conditions suitable, an animal rights activist chained herself to the railings in protest.

He has moved on to producing subverted paintings; one example is Monet's Water Lily Pond, adapted to include urban detritus such as litter and a shopping trolley floating in its reflective waters, another is Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, redrawn to show that the characters are looking at an English football hooligan dressed only in his Union Flag underpants, who has just thrown an object through the glass window of the cafe. These oil paintings were exhibited at a twelve day exhibition in Westbourne Grove, London in 2005.

In August 2004, Banksy produced a quantity of spoof British £10 notes substituting Princess Diana's head for the Queen's and changing 'Bank of England' to 'Banksy of England' Someone threw a large wad of these into a crowd at Notting Hill Carnival that year which some recipients then tried to spend in local shops. These notes were also given with invitations to a picturesonwalls.com Santas Ghetto exhibition. The individual notes have since been selling on eBay for about £200 each. A Limited run of 50 signed posters containing 10 uncut notes were also produced and sold by pictures on walls for £100 each to commemorate the passing of Princess Diana. One of these sold in May 2007 on eBay for $35,000. Banksy decorated a corridor in The Carlton Arms hotel in NYC.

In 2006, Banksy held an exhibition called Barely Legal, billed as a "three day vandalised warehouse extravaganza" in Los Angeles on the weekend of 16 September. The exhibition featured a live 'elephant in a room', painted in a pink and gold floral wallpaper pattern.[9]
After Christina Aguilera bought an original of Queen Victoria as a lesbian and two prints for £25,000,[10] on 19 October 2006 a set of Kate Moss paintings sold in Sotheby's London for £50,400, setting an auction record for Banksy's work. The six silk-screen prints, featuring the model painted in the style of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe pictures, sold for five times its estimated value. His stencil of a green Mona Lisa with paint dripping from her eyes sold for £57,600 at the same auction.

On 7 February 2007, Sotheby's auction house in London auctioned three Banksy works and reached the highest ever price for a Banksy work at auction of over £102,000 for his Bombing Middle England. Two of his other graffiti works, Balloon Girl and Bomb Hugger, sold for £37,200 and £31,200 respectively, which were well above their estimate prices.The following day's auction saw a further three Banksy works reach soaring prices. Ballerina With Action Man Parts reached £96,000 whilst Glory sold for £72,000 and Untitled (2004) sold for £33,600 - all three auctions sold way over expected estimates.To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website front home page with a new image of an auction house scene with people bidding on a picture that said, "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit."
In February 2007, the owners of a house with a Banksy mural on the side in Bristol decided to sell the house through an art gallery after offers fell through because the prospective buyers wanted to remove the mural. It is listed as a mural which comes with a house attached.
A small number of his works can be seen in the movie Children of Men including a stenciled image of two policemen kissing, and another stencil of a child looking down a shop.
In April 2007, Transport for London painted over Banksy's iconic image of a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns. Although the image was very popular, Transport for London claimed that the "graffiti" created a general atmosphere of neglect and social decay which in turn encourages crime.
On April 27th 2007, a new record high for the sale of Banksy's work was set with the auction of the work 'Space Girl & Bird' fetching £288,000 ($576,000), around 20 times the estimate at Bonhams of London.

Banksy has published a "manifesto" on his website. The text of the manifesto is credited as the diary entry of one Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO, which is exhibited in the Imperial War Museum. It describes how a shipment of lipstick to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation at the end of World War II helped the internees regain their humanity.

21st May 2007 Banksy gained the award for Art's Greatest living Briton, Banksy as expected did not turn up to collect his award and continued with his notorious anonymous status.

Europe graffiti

In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti. For example, in the year 1992 in France, the Protestant youth group Éclaireurs de France took their graffiti-scrubbing equipment into the Meyrieres Cave near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, where they carefully erased the ancient paintings from the walls, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archaeology.

In September 2006, the European Parliament issued the European Commission to create urban environment policies in order to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animals' excrement and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.

The Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to teenagers.

The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed 'cool' or 'edgy' image.

To back the campaign, 123 MPs (including Prime Minister Tony Blair) signed a charter which stated: Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem.However, in the last couple of years the British graffiti scene has been struck by self-titled 'art terrorist' Banksy, who has revolutionised the style of UK graffiti (bringing to the forefront stencils to aid the speed of painting) as well as the content; making his work largely satirical of the sociological state of cities, or the political climate of war, often using monkeys and rats as leitmotifs.

In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property isn't damaged.

Groups that live in industrial or poor areas may use graffiti for various purposes, especially if many groups populate one specific area or city. The main use is to mark either territory or "turf" by tagging a space such as a wall on building near or on the boundaries of a gang's turf to inform other gangs of their presence. Usually, this type of tag will have the name of the gang. They are also used to communicate with other gangs, usually to warn them of a coming assassination of a certain member, by either writing the member's street name and crossing it out, or by finding tags by the member and crossing them out.

If a gang overwrites another gang's tag, it is also the symbol of a takeover of a gang's turf or a sign of aggression toward the gang. While most cities now take measures to prevent this, such as washing or erasing tags, it was much more common in the mid 1980s when crime waves ran high.

Currently, The Public Animals, a graffiti group founded in late 1976 to early 1977, has assumed the role of a federation of sorts. TPA or The Public Animals is at the forefront of unifying former rivals between crews, cliques or gangs. Under the TPA umbrella, many graffiti artists from all over the world and from different associations have found the ability to peacefully unite and perform their art form without the obligatory allegiance to a particular group of individuals whose philosophies may be limited by territories, nationalities, or personal viewpoints. The leader of The Public Animals, JOEY TPA, maintains a simple yet effective philosophy in that the global aspect of art is evolving and that as artists, there is more to be had in unifying rather than dividing.

Radical and Political

Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist and anti-consumerist messages around the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicised art form in the subvertising, culture jamming or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms.
Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicise other art forms, and have used the prison sentences forced onto them as a means of further protest.

The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each others' practices. Anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers, for example, did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.

On top of the political aspect of graffiti as a movement, political groups and individuals may also use graffiti as a tool to spread their point of view. This practice, due to its illegality, has generally become favoured by groups excluded from the political mainstream (e.g. far-left or far-right groups) who justify their activity by pointing out that they do not have the money – or sometimes the desire – to buy advertising to get their message across, and that a "ruling class" or "establishment" control the mainstream press, systematically excluding the radical/alternative point of view. This type of graffiti can seem crude; for example fascist supporters often scrawl swastikas and other Nazi images.

Both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland produce political graffiti. As well as slogans, Northern Irish political graffiti include large wall paintings, referred to as murals. Along with the flying of flags and the painting of kerb stones, the murals serve a territorial purpose. Artists paint them mostly on house gables or on the Peace Lines, high walls that separate different communities. The murals often develop over an extended period and tend to stylisation, with a strong symbolic or iconographic content. Loyalist murals often refer to historical events dating from the war between James II and William III in the late 17th century, whereas Republican murals usually refer to the more recent troubles

Graffiti as A New Art Invention

Graffiti (strictly, as singular, "graffito," from the Italian — "graffiti" being the plural) are images or letters applied to publicly viewable surfaces such as walls or bridges. Graffiti has existed at least since the days of ancient civilizations such as Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.

Graffiti has changed over time into what are known as "modern graffiti": the public defacing of a surface using spray paint, markers, or other materials. When graffiti painting is done without the property owner's consent, it can be considered vandalism, which is punishable by law in most countries.

Graffiti can be used to communicate social and political messages, and as a form of advertising. It is also considered a modern art form, and can be seen in galleries around the world.

Some of the most common styles of graffiti have their own names. A "tag" is the most basic writing of an artist's name in either spray paint or marker. A graffiti writer's tag is his or her personalized signature. "Tagging" is often the example given when opponents of graffiti refer to vandalism, as they use it to label all acts of graffiti writing. Another form is the "throw-up," also known as a "fill-in," which is normally painted very quickly with two or three colors, sacrificing aesthetics for speed. Throw-ups can also be outlined on a surface with one color. A "piece" is a more elaborate representation of the artist's name, incorporating more stylized "block" or "bubble" letters, using three or more colors. This of course is done at the expense of timeliness and increases the likelihood of the artist getting caught.

A more complex style is "wildstyle", a form of graffiti involving interlocking letters, arrows, and connecting points. These pieces are often harder to read by non-graffiti artists as the letters merge into one another in an often undecipherable manner. A "blockbuster" is a "fill-in" that intentionally takes up an entire wall, sometimes with the whole purpose of blocking other "taggers" from painting on the same wall. Some artists also use stickers as a quick way to "get-up". While its critics consider this as lazy and a form of cheating, others find that 5 to 10 minutes spent on a detailed sticker is in no way lazy, especially when used with other methods.
Sticker tags are commonly done on blank postage stickers, or really anything with an adhesive side to it. "Stencils" are made by drawing an image onto a piece of cardboard or tougher versions of paper, then cut with a razor blade. What is left is then just simply sprayed-over, and if done correctly, a perfect image is left. Many graffiti artists believe that doing blockbusters or even complex wildstyles are a waste of time. Doing wildstyle can take (depending on experience) 8 hours to 2 days. Another graffiti artist can go over that time consuming piece in a matter of minutes with a bubble fill-in that would look just as good as a wildstyle piece.