Rubbish Curators
I recently noticed the guys from SITA working away beside our office cleaning up the graffiti. Nothing new, we’ve got a lot of graffiti/street art (delete as appropriate) around Stokes Croft… but what was interesting was they were leaving a particular stencil, and just painting over the crappy tags and badly drawn scribbles.
Now I’d never thought of this before, but it makes sense in a city sporting street artists such as Xenz, Sickboy, Ghostboy and of course Banksy. Particularly when their pieces are starting to become hugely valuable items. Would you want to be the one who’s just painted over a piece worth over 100k?
So, we’re left with an art conscious cleaning service. From disposer to curator; a lovely transition I think. Respect to the firm for having the foresight to at least think about it.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
I’m nearly positive they would have been under instruction to leave it because of value. I am hearing about this alot with banksys’ work. I find it quite disgusting that this goes on. How can you take away one piece of work and not another just because of its perceived financial value?
Banksy once created these amazing urban works. Now he i a very clever money spinner, has a team of hype spinners, a pa, gallery representation no doubt. I’m sure he is laughing all the way to the bank.
“Workers on the London Underground painted over a Pulp Fiction inspired piece earlier this month after mistaking it for ordinary graffiti. And in March, a mural in east London was almost entirely removed by thieves.
One of Banksy’s early murals was mistakenly painted over in the same month by Bristol council’s graffiti-removal contractors. And in February two smaller works in London were also painted over”.
“There is no way it could have been mistaken for graffiti. Whoever destroyed it is an idiot.”
http://search.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?scope=all&edition=d&q=banksy&go=Search
The list of this stuff is endless. Congrats on all the fame.
May 10th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
From what I saw (which was one person), they seem to be leaving any works… and painting over tags, which is a pretty fair system. I know that somewhere in the middle the scribbled tags will blend into decent works, but generally there’s a difference between the two.
As for Banksy hyping himself, that’s always been part of what he does. But it’s difficult to say how much control he has over other people buying and selling his work. He did publicly slate the amount they paid for his last piece, whether that was further publicity or genuine difficult it’s difficult to say.
Above link doesn’t work, but some of the final links resolved are:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/6599661.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2006/06/23/banksy_art_feature.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6592739.stm
May 18th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
its mad what’s going on in bristol at the moment. there was a ghostboy stencil on a shutter across from bar 130 on chelenham road (been there for about two years) it disapeared recently only to apear and be sold on ebay. the last bid i saw was £2655. this was only 3 days in to the auction. wish i had nicked it now