Carlsbad Art and Culture

As you may have learned via the entire internet, anonymous street artist Banksy from the UK has returned form his hiatus and has begun his newsest project titled ‘Better Out Than In’ in New York City. Started on Oct. 1st and concluding at the end of this month, Banksy will be installing 1 piece of street art in the streets of NY each day. Drifting away from his low tech boarderline anti-social-networking, Banksy has created an Instagram account posting each new piece.

Banksy is no stranger to the element of surprise and has often sprung projects and art show of this caliber on us in the past. This is his first designated urban art show in multiple locations over an extended period of time, but the idea has been implemented by others before HERE and HERE. For Banksy’s ‘Better Out Than In’, so far each piece has been entertaining, though many of them seem to be piggybacking on some of his past ideas.

The community of New York City has been in a frenzy since Banksy’s project announcement with large crowds scouring the city streets each night for his newest piece, but for every Banksy fan comes a Banksy hater – usually with graffiti affiliations.

The story goes that a young Banksy began his relationship with the spray can in the UK as a freehand (no stencil) graffiti artist. Overtime Banksy developed a freehand skill that was appreciated at least on a local level, but he later replaced the freehand style with stenciling after realizing that he could get pieces up on illegal walls faster through a pre-cut stencil. Maybe at this point true graffiti writers saw Banksy as a traitor, or as a cheater or maybe it really didn’t matter until Banksy found fame through his stencils. Either way, a number of Banksy’s pieces have been covered up not by city funded anti-graffiti buff units as you might suspect, but by graffiti writers themselves.

Enter OMAR NY, aka SWATCH. He is a NY based graffiti artist who no longer writes unless it is to destroy a Banksy with scribbles covering each piece and a sloppy tag. Omar has a history of ruining Banksy pieces HERE and HERE and has been coined the ultimate “dick rider” for using Banksy’s fame to boost his own. His motives are not positively known.

It’s an interesting situation. Vandalism being vandalized by more vandalism. Each is illegal which means we might just have to let the nature of the streets take its own course. Let’s see what happens if the skinny jean street artist stereotype is broken and a beefed up stencilist catches OMAR in the act!

Banksy balloon image photoshopped by Snyder Art.

Click HERE to check out Snyder’s Cardiff kook Banksy tribute installation