[dionidium]

This is one of those things, like complaining that the developer of a webapp you like "sold out" to a large company, that sounds nice unless it's your app with an offer or your building that just got tagged by Banksy. The owners of this building didn't assign the value; they inherited it. In any case it would be plain dumb to ignore it and I have no idea why anybody would upvote a comment suggesting that they do so.

[lifeformed]

My comment isn't direct at the individual in this article; I don't blame them for what they did. I just was thinking the whole culture that's evolved out of this is kind of annoying. Our society had the opportunity to just enjoy some cool images, but turned it into some stupid meta-drama.

The whole point of these works is to bring out this drama and highlight the absurdity of it all. It's not absurd in the sense that people are acting irrationally, but absurd in how our culture treats art as some mystical thing that has to be set on a pedestal behind protective glass. We've elevated "art" into something that supposedly only highly-cultured people can appreciate, and shut it away from the layperson.

By doing his art in the cheap and fragile form of graffiti, intimately accessible to everyone, he's giving art back to the people. It's just a simple creative expression for a creator to enjoy sharing. Yet, as Banksy surely predicted, we've tried to apply our weird notions of art onto it, that it should be locked up, cut out of the wall, sold for millions, viewable only to the elite.

There's no easy way out, because no individual is incentivized to change, yet society as a whole needs to change.

[Amadou]

it would be plain dumb to ignore it and I have no idea why anybody would upvote a comment suggesting that they do so.

I upvoted it because I was going to write essentially the same thing.

I've been thinking about it since Colbert publicly non-invited Banksy to paint the wall outside his studio. I don't believe that dollars are an appropriate unit of measurement for life experiences. I do believe that graffiti and others forms of street art are intentionally impermanent and functions of their location.

I would support trying to sell it if the building owners were living hand to mouth, but that's obviously not the case. The author's already monetized the "inheritance" by selling a literary "piece" to NY Magazine. She doesn't need to sell it so leaving it as part of the gestalt the artist created is the greater good. If it gets defaced by some other graffiti artist or the police/Bloomberg (who are only feeding the frenzy with their attitude) then so be it, the limited lifespan of graffiti is an inherent part of the art. Like making sandcastles.

I would probably set up a hidden video cam in case someone else came along and tried to steal it. Not that the stealing is necessarily a problem for street-art, but taking it would involve damage to the building itself and that would be unacceptably outside the scope of screet-art.

[joe_the_user]

I don't believe that dollars are an appropriate unit of measurement for life experiences. I do believe that graffiti and others forms of street art are intentionally impermanent and functions of their location.

But Banksy isn't graffiti in general or something other people decided was worth money after someone just did it for joy. Banksy's shtick is calculated to generate publicity and a whiff subversion specifically as a part of him maintain his position as a highly paid, highly valued, highly publicized. Banksy could have gone to NYC and done anonymous graffiti for year and no one would have notice if there wasn't any publicity.

[twoodfin]

Unlikely. His shopworn "social commentary" is typically a dead giveaway. ("I remember when all this was trees.")