[pippy]

The line to me is clear - tagging is vandalism, but if it exists to send a message it's art. A high level of skill is required to make art, either aesthetically or emotionally. Of course there is the grey area where a tag can be so well done you're questioning if it should be in a gallery, but by then the artist has built up a large repertoire of skills.

[thibauts]

Writers used to have some untold rules. Nevertheless tagging / grafiti is at its core, and before being an art form, a subversive means of expression for people that usually are invisible.

Why do you think writers use names like ads ? This is a quest for identity by people that have essentialy been made transparent and ignored by society. They reclaim urban space. "This is mine too, it has my name on it". "You can't do as if I didn't exist".

Being the target of such vandalism is no fun, for sure. I have been. When I did, I tried to remind myself tags are scars forgotten kids draw into average and blind people's landscape.

In this world of writers Banksy is a pacifist. He's addressing average people in their own language. He's talking to us with subtlety and good points, he's touching us, instead of shouting on us.

Be it him or any other writer, don't kill the messenger. If tags are pimples, then our society is sick. Would removing the symptoms cure the disease ? I doubt it, and I guess you do too. We know this all too well for a long time but still don't act on it as a group. These are only reminders, or first symptoms, of what is to come if we continue to indebt ourselves to other human beings. They'll reclaim.

[Apofis]

Nearly everything is art... that's the thing... art is a category. Something doesn't have to be good to be art. Something doesn't even have to have a message to be art. A big black rectangle painted on a canvas, while not considered very good by most, is still art.

[nikatwork]

You realize most writers start as taggers? It's part of the learning process. Everyone's a toy when they start out.

[harlanlewis]

Not all graffiti artists practice on buildings. Plywood is cheap.

Of course, tagging in public, perhaps in a hard to reach place, is a separate skill requiring its own practice... I'd just prefer they did it after having practiced the tag in their backyard first. Like Banksy.

[nikatwork]

Part of the skill in getting up, is getting up without getting caught. If you support full pieces, you shouldn't complain too much about people practicing with tags (although most people do complain).

The solution is of course to have legal walls. But that would be far too progressive for most councils.

[gohrt]

Getting up doesn't require tagging.

Tagging doesn't require permanent paint.

Legal walls don't satisfy the goal of getting somewhere challenging.

[iamben]

I think you're probably correct - and as I said, I think the 'man on the street' attitude in the UK right now would very much be that Banksy is an 'artist' rather than a vandal. I suspect this has a lot to do with an enormous amount of very favourable national press coverage.

[Volpe]

By that definition, tagging an (original) poem is art?

[pippy]

Yes.

The definition of art is more a philosophical question that varies from person to person, so getting consensus on defining what Banksy is is bound to ask the question. Perhaps that's one of his objectives.

[klenwell]

For one influential academic answer to this question, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence