Banksy

Once in a while some exciting, new and anti-establishment hero comes along and before you know they become the very thing they initially fought against. I'm beginning to believe that the corruption of the human spirit is conditional to the practical conditions of living. The greatest irony of Banksy's work is that the councils themselves are now protecting it. Graffiti is illegal, it is designed to piss the establishment off and in the best of cases make a comment on society however small. Well, that's how Banksy started, portraying the police as fun loving flower swirling homosexuals. The police themselves are now stoping people from vandalising his work. The question is why? Is it because when something is considered art, it's automatically perceived differently even thought the philosophical and cultural essence of the work is still subversive to the establishment. Is as if terrorists were accepted because the ways in which they conduct their actions can be considered or claimed as artistic. If something is illegal, it should be illegal under all circumstances, and the ingenuity and 'originality' of the work, however appreciated by the disjointed, uncultured and uneducated youth of today and the opportunists of today should not influence the perception of its criminality. Street Art is just an excuse for the establishment to devalue the significance of the freedom of speech, self expression and it arbitrarily chooses an artist to deviate from the fact they are so arrogant as to being able to decide what is art! Maybe Banksy's work is art, but if that's the case then King Robbo's work is also art! I believe that these artists and the many others out there have always consider themselves to be artists, what we shouldn't let the establishment decide is, who is a real artist and who is not.