Banksy, guerrilla art from Bristol to the world

Who’s Bansky? There are few people who care for art and don’t know his style, but nobody can tell exactly who he is. Although he conquered the public of a half world, he remains out of the starsystem and he continues working among ordinary people. Few information about him are well-known: he was born in Bristol in 1974, he started working as a street artist when he was 21, but he’s become famous only in 2003. According to people who met him, he is a modest and bashful, although his works of art are the exact opposite. His ironical stencils are about politics, culture and ethic: a guerrilla art  that in some years has covered the walls of the whole world, from Bristol to London, from the zoo in Barcelona to the wall of Jerusalem.  

His works face the most serious social problems showing the worst implications of capitalism, war and poverty but with ease and sense of humor. He satirizes on the contemporaneous artists, whose works are often considered “inferior”.

Many people say that Bansky simplifies excessively these topics to catch on the masses. Other critics, in particular the Keep Britain Tidy representatives, even  consider that his works are a crime, because they give a negative example to the aspirant to graffiti art.

Bansky is actually a street artist difficult to control. He used to enter the greatest museums of the world to place illegally his own works and his statements on the market of art. He often invited the citizens not to buy any “street art” unless it has been created with the aim of being sold. He stated: “Graffiti art is already difficult enough, some people want to eliminate graffiti and others draw mustache on them. It’s important to leave the street art in the place where it was born and to which it belongs.”

Bansky relates very easily with copyright too. He is not interested to royalties at all, he encourages the reproduction of his works and the emulator’s  entertainment instead. He asserts that many copies have a better quality than the original works.

His style is always unmistakable and coherent, no matter if it represents a waitress, an officer from the XVIII century or a child. You can laugh or look down with shame but it can’t leave you cold.