25. Since the end of the 1990s, Banksy is a brand that has produced and is still producing images and signs in public space, works of visual art, installations, performances, communication actions, films, books, poems. 26. Banksy grew up in a period when Damien Hirst established himself as the most prominent artist in the world. His approach to art was so deeply affected by the brand economic ideology that he finally embodies the very idea of Brand Artist. The two artists met and influenced each other, to the extent that they realized some artistic collaboration. In those years, Hirst was so prominent in the art context that in 2006, the Serpentine Gallery, and later the Fondazione Agnelli, hosted an exhibition of his personal collection entitled In The Darkest Hour There May Be Light. The artist standing out among the ones exhibited was Banksy, who, on that occasion, created a version of Napalm with bloodstains shown in this exhibition. 27. Banksy draws on the lesson by Hirst, he vandalizes the idea of Brand that in his systematic practice of relexicalization becomes Brandalism (Banksy, 2005). 28. “Brandalism: Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It’s yours to take, rearrange and reuse” (Banksy, 2005). 29. Banksy’s vandalism starts very early. In 2006, during an interview to the Swindle magazine made by Shepard Fairey, he declares “When I was about 10 years old, a kid called 3D was painting the streets hard. I think he’d been to New York and was the first to bring spray painting back to Bristol. I grew up seeing spray paint on the streets way before I ever saw it in a magazine or on a computer. 3D quit painting and formed the band Massive Attack [...]. Graffiti was the thing we all loved at school—we all did it on the bus on the way home from school. Everyone was doing it” (Banksy, 2006). 30. Banksy’s name for his first vandalism raids was Robin Banks, sounding like “Robbing Banks”. If you call yourself Robin Banks in Great Britain, it is plausible that your friends end up calling you Banksy. 31. While Robin Banks becomes Banksy, the world is
changing. The countercultural and libertarian ideology animating the Silicon Valley nerds looks at the World Wide Web as a unique opportunity in the world’s history to share knowledge and skills, a better world that IT engineers want to make accessible to everyone, creating phenomena like Apple and Microsoft, whose dream is one person-one computer. This is Web 1.0, followed, later on, by Web 2.0 with its platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Paypal. We know how it ended. 32. Banksy’s education goes from the end of the twentieth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This period witnesses the rise in the Western world of heterogeneous and fragmented counter-cultural demands, finding a common ground in criticism to the neo-liberal economic system, against which new ideas and proposals come to light. According to historians this sort of unity of the above demands, which later became a movement, dates back to 2000 and takes place in Seattle, on the occasion of the WTO (World Trade Organization) ministerial conference. This movement whose slogan is “another world is possible” meets in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for the World Social Forum in opposition to the World Economic Forum held in Davos. Then, in July 2001, the movement participates in Genoa G8, to express its dissent, but here the idea that another world is possible suffers a fierce repression, leaving on the ground of illusions the body of Carlo Giuliani. In September 2001, the Twin Towers collapse. 33. The No Global movement demands can be briefly described as criticism to multinational companies, exploitation of child labour, facilitation of wars, domination of banking systems, copyright, social control, environmental sustainability. Each of these demands was turned into images by Banksy.
PART THREE. WE, THE PEOPLE 36. The paradigm combining the idea of art with the idea of street is simple: to do something beautiful, I do not have to ask for permission. The detonating substance of street art is all here, there is the recovery of an aesthetic idea followed by an appropriate ethics. 37. The idea of combining art and street is not new, but Banksy systematizes it by grasping more than any other its intrinsically ostensive capacity and the communication potentiality of public space. Through his systematic practice, he turns the wall into a mass medium and the artist into mass media. 38. “Medium is the Message” (McLuhan, 1964). 39. The relationship between our world and art is realized within the exhibition spaces. It does not affect our ordinary, but our extraordinary. Visiting an exhibition is not generally an item on our to-do list, such as paying bills and picking up children from school. Our everyday life is not related to art in any way. Yet the art we produce will speak for us to posterity. 40. “Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. We, the people, affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art” (Banksy, 2005).
34. “Copyright is for losers ©™” (Banksy, 2005).
41. The artworks are located only in two places: museums and galleries, which are exhibition spaces, and the mode to enjoy these works is contemplative. What can you do in a museum besides contemplating artworks? Nothing.
35. By raising his vandal graffiti practice to the next level, through a systematic work of epistemic vandalism, Banksy shares the bustling idea of another possible world and addresses the issue of the truth of our “real”, by reprocessing the ethic and aesthetic imaginary aspects already informed by reality, subverting and reversing its meaning, creating an art without an instruction manual, just as Steve Jobs dreamt the Apple products would be.
42. Is public space an exhibition space? Yes, it is. Two institutions use it legally: the State and the market. The State exhibits street signs to regulate public space. The market shows advertising that is a form of persuasive communication intentionally aiming at changing our inclinations. According to the Global Advertising Spending data, in 2010 the total amount spent on advertising in the world was about 399 billion dollars while in 2019 it reached about 563 billion dollars.
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Advertising really works. It does change our inclinations, otherwise investments would not grow. What about the third institution, the one that Jurgen Habermas calls “lifeworld” (Habermas, 1986), in other words us? In addition to the finalistic images, public space also shows non-finalistic signs and images: graffiti, stickers, drawings, paintings, but this visual material is not authorized. It is abusive. The lifeworld is not allowed to exhibit in public space, unless your scribbles are worth a dizzying amount of money. 43. “Since its emergence, society has a spatial configuration, just as space has a social configuration. Socialization and spatialization have always been intimately intertwined, interdependent and in conflict” (Marramao, 2013). 44. Road signs and advertising in public space convey univocal messages. There is nothing to be interpreted, on the contrary, the remaining visual material is represented by clear hermeneutic images. 45. “For the first time with New York graffiti, (...) media have been attacked by their own form, in their own way of production and diffusion” (Baudrillard, 1976). 46. If the cognitive stimulus of a finalistic image is a dart thrown towards a specific point in our brain, the stimulus of a hermeneutic image can be compared to an aimless blossoming involving all our decoding system. This should at least stimulate a reflection over images legitimacy in public space. 47. The enjoyment mode of an artwork in public space is not contemplative at all. Indeed, it could be contemplated as well as rubbed, challenged, modified, deleted, tore, or taken, if you want. What can you do in the street after admiring an artwork? A lot. 48. “It is not aesthetic properties that transform an object into a work of art but relational properties” (Danto, 2013). 49. Very little remains of Banksy’s public works; he often shows the duration of his artwork in his publications. Three days, six minutes, two hours. 50. When it comes to Street Art, the idea of ephemeral art is often recalled. However, rather than ephemeral, it seems to be merely temporary.
