Popular yet unknown street artist Banksy has produced this stencil to generate publicity from the hype surrounding the imprisonment of graffiti writer Tox.
A jury has found Tox, aka Daniel Halpin, guilty of criminal damage. He now faces possible prison time.
In an ironic gesture toward judicial bias and Banksy's public persona, this latest piece comes after the Guardian reported that prosecutor Hugo Lodge told a jury:
"He is no Banksy. He doesn't have the artistic skills, so he has to get his tag up as much as possible."
Glad we cleared that up. Obviously the law permits 'culturally significant' vandalism if it makes a wall on your property worth more than the property itself - or if it raises the profile of small villages like Bristol.
There are stark paradoxes in the way graffiti and street art are simultaneously lauded and loathed. Public and bureaucratic perceptions of these art forms are polarised, but then sometimes not.
Meanwhile, artists like Banksy become wildly popular, and trashy graff writers like Tox are sent to prison.
The difficulty in placing graffiti and street art within the art history canon, the complexity in taxonomising them, means more arrests and more shocks are likely.
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