The crossing success of a street man
Banksy is the man whose face has never been seen, the man who, in few hours, installs, sticks and “stains” the walls protesting, against war, against political events, against all unjust that happen nowadays.
In the ‘90s graffiti changed their shape and they started to be painted with installations, stickers, stencils, posters. It was the beginning of a new mass movement called Street Art.
The new writers invaded every street and the new art spread very quickly to every part of the western world, USA, Germany, UK, Brazil, Argentina, Australia and also in Italy, France, Bulgaria and Norway, becoming the most important mass movement in the world besides punk.
Banksy‘s real name is Robert or Robin Banks, he was born in Bristol in 1974 or 1975 and he is one of the greatest exponents of Urban Art.
Expelled from school and taken to prison many times for little crimes and at the age of fourteen he started to cut stencils because just using spray was too slow, he said. He could make a graffito in half the time by using stencils and also halve the risk to be surprised and caught by the police.
He has early become an official member of the Bristol Underground Scene and made his work also in London where he found immediately many fans and followers.
In 2001, he published his first book “Banksy, Pictures of Walls” and in 2003 he painted a graffito on a wall of a private property for the single’s cover “Crazy Beat” included in the album Think Tank of Blur, the popular English band. This work had been removed by mistake very quickly and the owner of the wall, said, he had literally cried seeing the repainted wall.
In April 2007, it was time for his tribute to Quentin Tarantino: he painted a comic featuring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns but professional cleaners of Transport of London repainted the wall deleting the iconic image.
The Transport of London claimed about the fact that the graffito created “a general atmosphere of neglect and social decay which in turn encourages crime” and their staff are “professional cleaners not professional art critics“.
Every year the Government spends at least 23 million pounds to remove graffiti from walls and in the last months it has started to take steps against writers and their illegal works. An example, in this sense, is the case of a young man arrested in March this year and was sentenced to clean walls from graffiti twice a week.
In spite of the fact that the law is still against Urban Art, many of Banksy’s works are protected by glass to guarantee their preservation.
Banksy has been such a popular icon artist since 2006 that many stars from Hollywood and the music industry, such as Christina Anguilera and Angelina Jolie, pay millions of dollars for his original works. In 2008, he went to Louisiana, for the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, where he produced nine figures on destroyed houses’ walls.
2010 is the date of his film “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, directed by himself and produced in Los Angeles: a masterpiece of modern cinematography that shows the hidden real story of Urban Art and about Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in the USA mad about graffiti.
His popularity is now on top. For many years in Camden Town and all around London, many shops have been selling T-shirts, posters, coffee cups, books and other gadgets printed with his most famous graffiti works in the world.
Obviously he is also on the web: 14,600,000 are the results on Google UK looking for his nickname, dozens of pages on Facebook, on Twitter @banksynews, tweets news about him, besides the numerous unofficial and fans’ accounts.
The trailer of his film on the Youtube official channel, posted in April 2010, has passed the 1.907.560 views’ line, his website is linked by more than 3000 other websites and it has increased its ranking for 23.136 positions only in the last week. (Source Alexa).
But popularity is a big deal, especially if it is unexpected and it gets to a street man, not a business man. Every media wants to know everything about him, interviewing his wife, friends and relatives: on the web it is possible to find some photos about him totally unmasked but no one of those has been confirmed. The masked man is still without real identity.
Whether Urban Art is considered Art or not, Banksy has surely helped to think of graffiti not only as vandalism and he has given to many cities, amazing painted gift asking for nothing back.
Fonti:
Artlyst.com
Wikipedia
Chichester.gov.uk
Thensmc.com
Canvastown.com
