commodification of street art.

Now firmly entrenched as the graffiti artist most lauded by the fine arts crowd, Banksy raises an interesting point. While I can understand the rising auction prices of his work, all rooted in the street art he made his name with, I'm more interested in the speed with which his rise in stature has connected directly with changing attitudes towards his (still illegal) graf pieces.

At least two times that I know of, Banksy's work has been removed from it's original home (a public object) and auctioned off for notable amounts of money. This in and of itself doesn't bother me. My issue is with the forced commodification of something that Banksy's own work seems to classify as a means of fighting back for a chunk of public space. When that weapon can get cut or chiseled free, and then becomes a commercial object despite the wishes of the creator, that becomes something of a problem for me.

The same thing happened recently with Murakami taking a tagged Murakami billboard, and adding it to his collection.

I'm not saying I'm surprised, or that I don't understand the motivations, but at the same time, this seems reprehensible to me. The value in these pieces, in my opinion, is as a public good. Graffiti serves the commons, whether as inspiration, decoration, or call to arms. I have no issue with a graf artist working for corporate interests, but I have a problem with a public good being turned into a private one for profit.

In short, this is turning graf into what I considered it the antithesis of - advertising - is as much as it takes a public good (space, graf) and turns it into a private one (ads, auction fodder).

The thing is, objectively, there is little difference in this, than in getting an artist to paint on a branded pair of shoes, or bag. So I suppose this was inevitable, although it seems doomed to strip the whole enterprise of meaning.