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.
BANKSYIf 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.
BANKSYArt should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
BANKSYBut there’s no way round it-commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist. We’re not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it’s hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.
BANKSYGraffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.
BANKSYLive as a villain, die as a hero
BANKSYIf you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.
BANKSYWe don’t need any more heroes; we just need someone to take out the recycling.
BANKSYI 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.
BANKSYNobody ever listened to me until they didn’t know who I was
BANKSYGraffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers.
BANKSYGraffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.
BANKSYThe holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.
BANKSYIs graffiti art or vandalism? That word has a lot of negative connotations and it alienates people, so no, I don’t like to use the word ‘art’ at all.
BANKSYIf 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.
BANKSYPeople 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.
BANKSYShould # graffiti be judged on the same level as modern art? Of course not: It’s way more important than that
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