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I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.

Banksy

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.
BANKSY

Art Book Mean
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.
BANKSY

Cities Past School
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 re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
BANKSY

Giving Rocks Space
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.
BANKSY

Believe Justice Thinking
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.
BANKSY

Looks People White
Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers.
BANKSY

Mind People
Nobody ever listened to me until they didn’t know who I was
BANKSY

Graffiti Knows Piece Wall
If Michaelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today they’d be making Avatar, not painting a chapel.
BANKSY

Alive Live Painting Today
If you feel dirty, insignificant or unloved, then rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society, and they have sex 50 times a day.
BANKSY

Dirty Models Role Sex
Writing graffiti is about the most honest way you can be an artist. It takes no money to do it, you don’t need an education to understand it, and there’s no admission fee.
BANKSY

Artist Graffiti Writing
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.
BANKSY

Art Book Mean
Gaza 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.
BANKSY

Air Cutting Drinking
In the future, everybody will be anonymous for 15 minutes.
BANKSY

Anonymous Everybody Future Minute
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.
BANKSY

Army Country Military
It’s a very frustrated feeling you get when the only people with good photos of you work are the police department.
BANKSY

Feelings People Police
Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.
BANKSY

Graffiti Hipster Speak

I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.

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Popular Authors

I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Banksy Quotes