Banksy seems to have put away his stencil set for a while and penned an interesting article in today’s Guardian about the whitewashing of street art in Melbourne to make way for the Commonwealth games. This makes for an excellent preamble to his worries about what the Olympics mean for London:
The games will be set in east London, where Hackney is one of the few remaining parts of the city where affordable studio space for artists still exists. After the warehouses have been flattened by compulsory purchase orders, the pots of grey paint will be opened and an area rich in street culture and frontier spirit will disappear. Factory doors whose flaked layers of Hammerite reveal history like the rings in a tree stump will be thrown on the fire. Disused cranes perched on top of foundries like skeletal crows will be torn down. Everything will be replaced by a cardboard-partitioned village perched on a pile of cheap laminate flooring. And if you think the graffiti will be removed so it can be replaced by vistas of clean urban space, think again. Every meaningful spot will be clogged with giant billboards by the likes of McDonald’s encouraging you to get fit by staying at home and watching the games on TV.
In SE1 we’ve already seen most of his work painted over, often the dull grey paint used doesn’t even cover the whole wall – just the offending artwork is vanquished leaving an odd distracting patch of nothingness on peeling and filthy walls. If only we could remember to take our Prozium we probably wouldn’t notice…
