[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.