QUOTATIONS FROM BANKSY. WALL AND PEACE

• Despite what they say graffiti is not the lowest form of art. Although you might have to creep out at night and lie to your mum it’s actually one of the more honest art forms availabe. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on the best walls a town has to offer and nobody is put off by the price of admission.
• A wall has always been the best place to publish your work.
• Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. We the people, affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.

• The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires…

• I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said “that’s a clever anagram of art” and I had to pretend I’d known that all along.

• People who enjoy waving flags don’t deserve to have one.

• T.V. has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.

• You know what hip-hop has done with the word ‘nigger’ – I’m trying to do that with the word vandalism, bring it back.

• If you don’t own a train company then you go and paint on one instead. It all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something.. that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it.

• 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.

• Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

• I have no interest in ever coming out. I figure there are enough self-opinionated assholes trying to get their ugly little faces in front of you as it is. You ask a lot of kids today what they want to be when they grow up, and they say, “I want to be famous.” You ask them for what reason and they don’t know or care. I’m just trying to make the pictures look good; I’m not into trying to make myself look good. I’m not into fashion. The pictures generally look better than I do when we’re out on the street together.

• Is graffiti art or vandalism? That word has a lot of negative connotations and it alienates people, so no, I don’t like to use the word ‘art’ at all.

• 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.

• When explaining yourself to the Police it’s worth being as reasonable as possible. Graffiti writers are not real villains. I am always reminded of this by real villains who consider the idea of breaking in some place, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of.

• Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

• A lot of people think that scuttling around stencilling images onto buildings in the middle of the night is the action of a sad, frustrated individual who can’t get attention or recognition any other way. They might be right, but I’ve done gallery shows and, if you’ve been hitting on people with all sorts of images in all sorts of places, they’re a real step backwards, painting the streets means becoming an actual part of the city. It’s not a spectator sport.

• The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

• Some people want to make the world a better place. I just wanna make the world a better-looking place. If you don’t like it, you can paint over it!

• Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums. Graffiti has more chance of meaning something or changing stuff than anything indoors. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars, and generally is the voice of people who aren’t listened to. Graffiti is one of those few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they’re having a piss.

• People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

QUOTES FROM HOME SWEET HOME_ Banksy’s Bristol by Steve Wright.

• You could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn’t be as exciting as it is when you go out and paint something big where you shouldn’t do.

• He likes to keep a low profile. He’s got a very low threshold for bullshit from anyone. But he’s a grat game-player -he loves that mystique thing, but he also likes being ring-fenced from journalists and the media.