Internationally renowned graffiti artist Banksy has hit Detroit, which is cool and going to get people talking. Banksy works undercover, but several pieces have been found, as
Metro Times showed us last week.
Here's a link to a
Flickr discussion of his work.
His piece in the Packard Plant, however, has sparked controversy. The Detroit nonprofit 555 Gallery and Studios removed it to preserve it. Should it have been left in its original location or preserved at all cost? The art world is abuzz.
Excerpt from the
Detroit Free Press:
The British-born art world celebrity and provocateur, who hides behind a cloak of anonymity and whose graffiti paintings have made headlines from Los Angeles to London, has tagged Detroit -- most prominently a crumbling wall at the derelict Packard plant.
Discovered last weekend, the stenciled work shows a forlorn boy holding a can of red paint next to the words "I remember when all this was trees." But by Tuesday, artists from the 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios, a feisty grassroots group, had excavated the 7-by-8-foot, 1,500-pound cinder block wall with a masonry saw and forklift and moved the piece to their grounds near the foot of the Ambassador Bridge in southwest Detroit.
The move -- a guerilla act on top of Banksy's initial guerilla act -- has sparked an intense debate about the nature of graffiti art, including complicated questions of meaning, legality, value and ownership. Some say the work should be protected and preserved at all costs. Others say that no one had a right to move it — and that the power and meaning of graffiti art is so intrinsic to its location that to relocate it is to kill it.
Read the entire article
here.
To check out more of Banksy's work go
here.
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