Banksy
"The immature poet imitates and the mature poet plagiarizes," said T.S. Eliot. If imitation is indeed the finest form of flattery, then does it follow that plagiarism is a worthwhile pursuit? Indeed it can be. Street art, including visual art and music, is both plagiarizer and plagiarized. To imitate without paying full homage to the original creator is to fail in the ultimate pursuit of aesthetic brilliance. The art of Banksy integrates itself fully with popular culture and community. By stealing space and time, Banksy and street artists like him raise poignant political questions about the ownership of public space and the social class hierarchies that determine access to and enjoyment of the public domain. Likewise, Banksy participates in the time-honored tradition of sampling. By mixing and matching, cutting and pasting, Banksy is following in a long and venerable line of artistic genius that revels in the creative potential of judicious stealing. Shakespeare stole from the Bible, transforming the Biblical literature into performance art. Picasso and Braque took liberally from still life tradition and contemporary news cuttings to produce cubist collage. The sonic masters of the 20th and 21st century build their musical canon on sampling techniques. What matters is not whether something was stolen, but how it was rearranged, repurposed, and reproduced.
True stealing is something completely different. In Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy and Guetta explore the difference between artistic stealing for creative flourishing vs. misappropriation for commercial exploitation. The latter is a form of stealing far more insidious than the former, according to both Guetta and Banksy. The title of their documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, refers explicitly to the commercialization of all art and not just the commercialization of street art. All commercially viable art galleries and museums bank on the visitor becoming a consumer, making purchases of trinkets that are often factory made and bear no spiritual affinity to the original art they serve to imitate. Herein lies the difference between imitation and theft that T.S. Eliot refers to in his statement. Imitation mocks the function of art and does a disservice to both art history and the community. Theft, when undertaken in the ways achieved by Banksy and other artists, uphold the fundamental tenets of the creative enterprise.
Placing at within a historical, political, and social context can help liberate it from commercial valuation. There is nothing inherently wrong with the commercialization of art; after all, supporting artists financially helps stimulate artistic productivity and may even increase net quality overall as artists have access to better materials, training, and time. As Morris puts it, "art costs time, trouble, and thought," (p.11). Commercialization of art led to some of art history's...
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