People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish… but that’s only if it’s done properly.
BANKSYGaza is often described as ‘the world’s largest open air prison’ because no-one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons – they don’t have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost every day.
More Banksy Quotes
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I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said ‘that’s clever it’s an anagram of art’ and I had to pretend I’d known that all along.
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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.
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Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.
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Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie.
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Nobody knows what you feel inside unless you tell them.
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Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.
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People are fond of using military terms to describe what they do. We call it bombing when we go out painting, when of course it’s more like entertaining the troops in a neutral zone, during peacetime in a country without an army.
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Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
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If you want someone to be ignored then build a life-size bronze statue of them and stick it in the middle of town. It doesn’t matter how great you were, it’ll always take an unfunny drunk with climbing skills to make people notice you.
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All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra history. They’ve been used to start revolutions and to stop wars
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People seem to think if they dress like a revolutionary they don`t actually have to behave like one.
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I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There’s no gallery show or book or film. It’s pointless. Which hopefully means something.
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I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.
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If it doesn’t matter, get rid of it. If you can’t get rid of it, it matters.
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I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.
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I don’t think you should have to pay to look at graffiti. You should only pay if you want to get rid of it.
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Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers.
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The art world is the biggest joke going. It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak. And modern art is a disgrace – never have so many people used so much stuff and taken so long to say so little.
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In the future, everybody will be anonymous for 15 minutes.
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I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in – like peace and justice and freedom.
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I love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies.
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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.
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If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.
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I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don’t do that so much anymore.
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People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.
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My lawyer’s opinion is that the cops might not actually be able to charge me with criminal damage any more – because theoretically my graffiti actually increases the value of property rather than decreasing it. That’s his theory, but then my lawyer also believes wearing novelty cartoon ties is a good look.
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