Banksy
Banksy
Banksy is an England-based graffiti artist, political activist and film director of unverified identity. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Observers have noted that his style is similar to Blek le Rat,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionArtist
cities trying billboards
You live in the city and all the time there are signs telling you what to do and billboards trying to sell you something.
school past cities
If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you've made your own sculpture.
school cities names
If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead... it all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something... that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it.
running thinking cities
the people who run our cities dont understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit... the people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff.... any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you ,, its yours to take, rearrange and re use.Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head..
great paintings
It's great, I guess, when your paintings are hanging up in a museum.
characters classic good letters york
I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.
art scrub
Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.
art form guy legitimate money perfectly protest
I wouldn't want to be remembered as the guy who contaminated a perfectly legitimate form of protest art with money and celebrities.
art course judged
Should graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It's way more important than that.
good-luck artist people
Traditional graffiti writers have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn't become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do. If you're the type who gets sentimental about people scribbling over your stuff, I suggest graffiti is probably not the right hobby for you.
couple thinking people
All I know about what people think of my gear is what a couple of my friends tell me, and one of them always wants to borrow money, so I'm not sure how reliable he is.
art animal wild-and-free
I don't know if street art ever really works indoors. If you domesticate an animal, it goes from being wild and free to sterile, fat and sleepy. So maybe the art should stay outside.
art house guilty
I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.
white people looks
The one thing you can rely on is if you get disturbed halfway through a painting and it looks a bit naff, then someone will preserve that piece, remove it and a few months later it'll be paraded round Sotheby's by people wearing white gloves.