‘This is not a Banksy!’: street art as aesthetic protest

Abstract

This paper examines the dialogue and transformation of public space that occurred after Banksy's Slave Labour was removed without notice from a wall in North London, transported to Miami and listed for auction. Despite the high-profile media coverage of the ‘theft’ of Banksy's piece, the explosion of new works provoked by its extraction was for the most part simply erased as it appeared. We argue that the excision of Slave Labour provided a ‘gap in the sensible’ and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a lively local intertextual visual dialogue, which transformed this otherwise apparently unremarkable London side street into an arena for aesthetic protest and critical social commentary.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks for the insightful critical feedback provided by two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. The original Bad Panda was produced in 2005 by the French designer Julien d'Andon, who designed the panda for French brand KULTE.

^2. Bansky himself produced a playful museum located work referencing The Treachery of Images, by framing a ‘real’ working pipe integral to the museum, and adding an inverted variant of Magritte's inscription, which observes that, ‘This is a pipe’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Hansen

1

Susan Hansen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Middlesex University, London and chair of the Forensic Psychology Research Group. She has research interests in communities' material engagements with, and affective responses to, street art and graffiti; in the analysis of graffiti as a form of visual dialogue; and in the promise of an archaeological approach to understanding street art and graffiti through the longitudinal photo documentation of single sites.

Flynn Danny

2

Danny Flynn is Visiting Lecturer in Art and Design at the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. His current research examines the semiotics of graffiti and street art in situ, and the social organization of street art tours. His previous research involved laser cutting technology used for pattern cutting in the production of letterpress printing material. He works as a graphic artist and runs a gallery named G511ERY in North London.