legit Banksy

Banksy has a new piece in Gillett Square in Dalston. The local council wants to clean the wall, people are protesting.

Authorities say:

"Our position is not to make a judgment call on whether graffiti is art or not, our task is to keep streets clean."

The speaker for a community organisation, Hackney Co-operative Developments, that defends the graffiti, says:

"I am shocked to hear of such an unpopular and unnecessary act of vandalism against a valuable work of art. Banksy is something of a folk hero."

Baudrillard says:

“one must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contest anything, if it ever did… The work of art offers itself of its own initiative as immediately integrable in a global system that conjugates it like any other object or group of objects.” (it was back in 1981)

I found this situation hilarious and dramatic also: Banksy's stencils always played this game of resuscitating images at the second level, the level of irony. Now graffiti is ironically treated as bourgeois propriety, as valuable and recognized work of art. That is done in the face of the local authorities' stupidity (but they are doing what they always did: destroy alternative expressions of any kind). It is interesting how the simple gesture of legitimating graffiti uses the ugly language of the establishment. How right Baudrillard was, decades ago.

via Evening Standard