Monetizing Outlaw Art And Killing The Artists

Consider the graffiti artist who puts something up in the dead of night on some wall.

A year later, it's auctioned off for $1.1 million.

Irony twisted in irony.  Banksy's graffiti is both clever and well executed.  More succinctly, it's often brilliant.

If he were doing these in a studio on canvas, they would be good.  But the power of these drawings is greatly multiplied by the fact that they are (mostly) done secretly, without permission, in public places, and their placement is part of the comment they make about the world.  Some examples:

• A pole vaulter painted on a wall high above a chain-link face next to the wall.  
• A rat painted into the barred red circle on a no-stopping sign.  
• "Sorry, the life style you ordered is currently out of stock" on a billboard painted on the side of a building.  
• A suited man with a briefcase and a sandwich board over his chest reading "0% interest - in people."  Is this a bank wall I wonder?  
• A hand coming out of a painted barred window reaching down to pick the lock on a painted doorknob on the side of a Bail Bond shop.  

You get the idea.  But the art work itself speaks much more strongly than my descriptions.  You can see all these and many more on Banksy's website. 


This all came up because of a recent LA Times story about a  Banksy drawn on a gas station wall that was cut out of the wall and is going up for auction. The flower girl is faced with a plant that has a surveillance camera where the flower should be.  (For the record, the article says that in this case the owner of the wall gave permission.)

So, a huge part of the appeal of these pieces is the social/political comment at a location that amplifies the point. 

So what does it mean when the owner of a painted wall cuts out the work and sells it for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more?  What does this tell us about how the market works, about fairness, profit, free speech, decency?   Is there an obligation to share some of the profit with the artist?  Often the artist is not known.  In fact has been forced to hide his identity.  Is there an obligation to share the work and/or the profit with the community?  Not under our current private property laws.  The artist is technically a and outlaw, a vandal who has defaced someone else's property and could be charged and tried.  The property owner who may be the object of the artists political humor, turns around and profits from the 'crime' against him. 

This becomes all the more poignant when we consider the graffiti artist who was recently killed by police who tasered him.

[Israel] Hernández, 18, was an artist and photographer who had some of his work exhibited locally. On the morning of Aug. 6, he was spray-painting his graffiti tag “Reefa” on an abandoned McDonald’s when the Miami Beach cops began to chase him. After being cornered a couple blocks away Officer Jorge Mercado shot Hernández with a Taser in the chest. He was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly thereafter.  [from the Militant]

My heart breaks for Hernández' family and friends at this illustration of how police thinking causes so much tragedy.  I don't mean to belittle this by not going into it more fully.  This is worthy of further posts.  Perhaps the fallout will lead to better police training and recognition of kids' needs to express themselves and finding ways to help them do that legally.  

I'm still trying to untwist my brain over all this.

Graffiti, it seems to me, basically comes from an imbalance in society.  Those who feel they have no legitimate means of control over their lives, make their mark by defacing other people's (public or private) property.   It's anger at their own lack of power and at those who have more power. Their spray paint is a visual tantrum.   For others it's putting their brand out to the world.  They may not have $1 million to get a stadium or building named after them, but they do have spray paint.  Others are using spray paint and stencils to present their art or to make a statement about the world. 

Artists like Banksy,  Jean-Michel Basquait, and Kevin [Keith] Haring, whose graffiti has moved from the streets to museums and private collections, illustrate the ironies of capitalism.  One can argue that at first they simply had no legitimate venues, and like street musicians, gave their art away for free until they gained access to legitimate venues.  But a big part of the appeal of graffiti art, unlike street music, comes from the fact that they are making political statements elegantly but illegally.  It's outlaw art, as the police response to Hernández reminds us.

Should graffiti artists share in the profits when their work is auctioned off to the wealthy? 

There are moves to give artists a share in the market appreciation of their work.  From a 2011 NY Times article

"When the taxi baron Robert Scull sold part of his art collection in a 1973 auction that helped inaugurate today’s money-soused contemporary-art market, several artists watched the proceedings from a standing-room-only section in the back. There, Robert Rauschenberg saw his 1958 painting “Thaw,” originally sold to Scull for $900, bring down the gavel at $85,000. At the end of the Sotheby Parke Bernet sale in New York, Rauschenberg shoved Scull and yelled that he didn’t work so hard “just for you to make that profit.”

The uproar that followed in part inspired the California Resale Royalties Act, requiring anyone reselling a piece of fine art who lives in the state, or who sells the art there for $1,000 or more, to pay the artist 5 percent of the resale price."

So, perhaps, if Banksy's Flower Girl sells for $300,000, there would be $15,000 in it for him.  But this is a reminder that there is little that is 'natural' in the market.  It's all about who had the power to get laws written and whom the laws favor or dismiss.  

I've also posted about the film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, which features Banksy and is a good way to get a sense of some of the graffiti artists and their motivation.  And about his painting - Taking a Break. 

Taking a Break

Image from Make Technology on your own time

I love this picture for so many reasons.  This is supposed to be by Banksy, the British graffiti artist featured in Exit Through The Gift Shop.   First, the idea of 'improving' a classic piece of art forces us to reconsider what we think of as classic and what it depicts.  In this case the hardworking slaves.  Wow!  Why didn't I ever think about this woman sitting down and taking a break before?


And simply taking her outside of the frame into the real world is something we rarely do in art galleries.

And with a bunch of redistricting board notes and video which I haven't posted, I'm feeling a bit like the woman with the cigarette.  Though my labors are all self-imposed.  But I'll try to get something up soon.  It's just that they keep having meetings.  Yesterday they went through Voting Rights Act expert, Lisa Handley's, initial thoughts on the private plans' statistics and then more board member attempts to get the nine rural districts needed to be in compliance with the VRA. 

The image is from a post on Altered Thrift Store Art and there are other examples, but that one was by far my favorite.

Crazy French Camera Man Documents Grafitti Artists or ?

As a blogger who carries his digital camera/video in his pocket all the time, I couldn't help but relate to Thierry Guetta, the crazy Frenchman who films everything he sees.  He says he doesn't ask, he just films. He runs a clothing shop probably on Melrose in LA when the movie starts.  He buys in bulk - I got the impression from France, but I could be wrong - then hyped them and charged $400 for a cheap T shirt.  This should have been a clue to where this movie was going.  I don't usually go through the story line of the movie, but I don't think it matters in this case because it's how the story is told that makes this movie.  But if you don't want to know, skip the rest.

[Update, 10:50am - I forgot to mention the name of the movie:  Exit Through the Gift Shop.  It's not obvious and I'm not totally sure I'm interpreting it right, but it would seem to emphasize the commercialization of the art.]

On a trip to Paris, he finds out his cousin is making space invader inspired tiles and gluing them to buildings at night.   He follows him around Paris at night as he surreptitiously puts up his tiles.  His cousin introduces him to other graffiti artists (some call these street artists because they use media besides spray paint) and he starts filming them at work telling them he's making a documentary.  Much of the film is from these hand held films climbing up buildings at night posting all sorts of graffiti.  Back in LA he meets Shepherd Fairey whom everyone knows from his ubiquitous Obama Hope poster.  But in the film, he's going to Kinko's and making giant peel off illustrations that he puts up on buildings.

Soon Thierry is searching for Banksy  [The Banksy link is well worth it!], the most famous of graffiti artists, and eventually Banksy falls into his lap (is this a clue?) when he arrives in LA alone and contacts Thierry's cousin and Thierry gets to be his LA guide. 

Banksy in disguise for interview

Banksy lets Thierry film him but always in a black hoodey and his voice altered, or with his face pixeled out. Then asks when the documentary is going to be finished.  Thierry has never made a movie, he just films and sticks them in boxes.  But he tries. The film is bad.  Banksy tells Thierry to go back to LA and put on his own art show.

This is when Thierry's clothing store experience comes into play as he hires people to make hundreds, maybe thousands of 'works' which are basically copies of famous paintings with photoshop changes and in some cases paint dripped or sprayed on them.  It's marketed spectacularly and he sells a million dollars of art.

When we left, my wife said it was all a hoax and I scoffed.  But as I think about it five days later, maybe it is.  Check out the Wikipedia post on Mr. Brainwash, Thierry's artist name.  It seems Mr. Brainwash's show was real.  But is there really this stash of movies somewhere?

It doesn't matter.  If it is a hoax, then it is probably even more amazing than if it's true.  And which parts are hoax and which are true?  I would also say this is a film where the soundtrack plays a huge role in pulling these low res visuals into a coherent movie.    And given this film celebrates artists breaking the law for their art and Thierry shoots and doesn't even ask later,  I felt no compunction at all, taking some video of the movie in the theater, so you could get a sense of it.  Unfortunately, of the three clips I took, the one I'm posting is the best, and it's not that good.  In this clip, Thierry describes Banksy at Disneyland, hanging a blow up hostage/prisoner in an orange jumpsuit, black hood, and handcuffed, onto a fence where the old west train rides past in Frontierland.  When I first went to Denali National Park and rode the bus through the wilderness and people would point out a caribou way off in the distance, or a bear or moose, I dreamed of making plywood cutouts and putting up giraffes and zebras that would be barely visible from the bus.  So I can relate to this prank.  The security guards at Disneyland weren't amused.



This is not a typical Hollywood movie.  Good fun.


[Update Sept. 18, 2010:  NY Times article about another graffiti artist  MOMO's 8 mile paint drip in NYC.]