A Bristol group called Appropriate Media is outraged by gentrification-causing graffiti writers. So much so that they’re actually protesting. The anonymous group splashed washable red paint on a Banksy mural entitled “The Mild Mild West†over the weekend, and nobody understands what they want.
Graffiti artists are the performing spray-can monkeys for gentrification. In collusion with property developers, they paint deprived areas bright colours to indicate the latest funky inner city area ripe for regeneration. Pushing out low income families in their wake, to be replaced by middle class metrosexuals with their urban art collections.
But it’s not just the conspiracy between vandals and developers to drive up housing prices that’s the problem.
Appropriate Media oppose the over-articulation of the urban environment. Appropriate Media oppose the over-interpretation of public space by city planners, council regeneration officers, community artists, graffiti artists and other such unrelenting fundamentalists.
With the vague call for “the appropriate and legitimate use of public and private property,” Appropriate Meida is basically a dumbed-down, self-loathing version of New York’s Splasher, the anti-graffiti group that daubed paint on the work of big name street artists like Banksy, Shepard Fairey and Swoon back in 2006 and 2007. One difference though: Appropriate Media didn’t waste time writing their own over-wrought manifesto, they simply plagiarized someone else’s anti-Banksy rant.
this is awesome. the mural looks even better. way to go. banksy's probably pleased with it himself.
Well done Banksy!
Way to go, anonymous group, you can't silence him. Banksy's work is beautiful, it's not a crime.
Way to go indeed! Banksy and other graffiti artists who don't think about the repercussions of their actions are not only idiots, their dangerous. Everytime Banksy paints a wall in any community or neighborhood that is not already fully and completely gentrified, he is merely doing his part to drive out to pave the way for profitizing redevelopment, driving low-income residents on the streets when they can't afford real to live in their own home neighborhoods because the yuppies want to live someplace hip. Banksy and similar artists are the definition of a capitalist tool!
I'm sure Banksy has great intentions, but if he really wanted to subvert capitalism, he could start with some real vandalism: go into gentrified areas and spraypaint "F— YOUR MOM" on every surface in big, ugly letters. Uglification (anti-gentrification) of beautiful spaces is the truly noble calling of the grafitti artist, and beautification of ugly spaces is the misguided, harmful, capitalist function.