"Pleasure stolen from the poor": Community discourse on the 'theft' of a Banksy Article (PDF Available) in Crime Media Culture 12(3) · November 2015 with 61 Reads DOI: 10.1177/1741659015612880 16.19 · Middlesex University, UK Abstract The removal of street art from community walls for private auction is a morally problematic yet legal action. This paper examines community reactions to the removal of Banksy’s No Ball Games for private auction. Five hundred unique reader comments on online newspaper articles reporting this controversial event were collected and analyzed. An emerging set of urban moral codes was used to position street art as a valuable community asset rather than as an index of crime and social decay. The latter discourse informed a repertoire that depicted No Ball Games as unlawful graffiti that was rightfully removed. Here, the operations of ‘the police’ (Rancière, 1998: 17) in the distribution of the sensible are evident in the assertions that validate and depoliticize the removal of No Ball Games.

This repertoire was used to attribute responsibility for the work’s removal to deterministic external forces, while reducing the accountability attributable to those responsible for the removal of the work. A contrasting anti-removal repertoire depicted street art as a gift to the community, and its removal as a form of theft and a source of harm to the community. The pro-removal repertoire incorporates and depoliticizes elements of the anti-removal repertoire, by acknowledging the moral wrong of the removal, but yielding to the legal rights of the wall owners to sell the work; and by recognizing the status of street art as valuable, but asserting that the proper place for art is a museum. The anti-removal repertoire counters elements of the pro-removal repertoire, by acknowledging the illegality of street art, but containing this to the initial act of making unsanctioned marks on a wall, after which point the work becomes the property of the community it is located within. This analysis reveals an emergent set of urban moral codes that positions a currently legal action as a form of criminal activity.

Discover the world's research ‘This is not a Banksy!’: street art as aesthetic protest Susan Hansen* This paper examines the dialogue and transformation of public space that occurred after Banksy’s Slave Labour was removed without notice from a wall in North London, transported to Miami and listed for auction. Despite the high-proﬁle media coverage of the ‘theft’ of Banksy’s piece,the explosion of new works provoked by its extraction was for the most part simply erased as they appeared. We argue that the excision of Slave Labour provided a ‘gap in the sensible’ (Rancie `re 2004) and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a lively local intertextual visual dialogue, which transformed this otherwise apparently unremarkable London side street into an arena for aesthetic protest and critical social commentary. Introduction Its very destruction causes one to remember. (Schacter 2008, 47) In London alone, 100 million pounds per year is spent wiping the walls clean using various solvents and painting over unsanctioned images and writing deemed not to ‘add value’ to an area (Greater London Authority 2002).

This is a relentless and ongoing everyday practice of surveillance, judgement and erasure, and in consequence the anti-grafﬁti industry is worth multi-billions (Mubi brighenti 2010). The mundane lawful removal, or ‘bufﬁng’, of work by agents of the local council or by private residents is predicated on the judgement of such work as diminishing the symbolic capital of an area.Islington Council (2014, n.p.) warns that, ‘it can be the catalyst for a downward spiral of neglect in an area, and encourage other more serious criminal activity’. Such aesthetic socio-moral judgements are based on long-held associations between grafﬁti and criminal activity, as a visible index of social deprivation and urban decay, and as a form of abjection and territory marking akin to public urination, as dirt or ﬁlth, or ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 2002, 36). Street art may also ‘disappear’ over time, via the natural processes of degradation and decay; or may be wilfully destroyed by being written over, or ‘capped’, by others. This is usually a marker of blatant disrespect towards the original work and/or artist.

A more exceptional and historically recent form of erasure is through the careful excision of street art for exploitation by capital. Paradoxically, the removal of street art for proﬁt appears to occur only after efforts to preserve and protect the work have been implemented by local councils and residents. This ‘protection’ is usually accomplished by ﬁxing a Perspex shield over the work, which marks it as being ‘of value’ and worthy of conservation. This is presumably designed to guard against overwriting, accidental erasure or ‘defacement’ by others, and to preserve the work against the processes of degradation and decay. This form of protective practice is thus predicated on a judgement of such work as ‘adding value’ to an area. However, marking work as ‘valuable’ to the community and attempting to protect it from harm may q2015 Taylor & Francis have the unintended effect of visibly commodifying the work, which in turn may make it vulnerable to removal for auction on the art market, where work by successful street artists such as Banksy is highly lucrative, even in the absence of provenance, and can reach in excess of a million pounds per piece (Frigerio and Khakimova 2013).

Indeed, the Sincura Group,which facilitated the recent removal of Banksy’s iconic No Ball Games from a wall in the socio-economically deprived area of Tottenham, London, drew on this very rhetoric of protection by claiming that the work was being salvaged for restoration (BBC 2013). However, their further claim that the work was not being appreciated in situ by the local community proved more contentious. Conservation and appreciation are established practices traditionally associated with the recognition of, and duty of care towards, ﬁne art and cultural heritage. Sincura’s assertion that the excised work was not being appreciated in situ, and the implication that proper appreciation could only occur in a sanctioned gallery space or museum seems extraordinary, given that street art’s very existence, as such, has been argued to be dependent on its in situ nature, and ongoing dynamic relationship with the community it exists within (Young 2014).

This determinist discourse – of the need to remove and preserve street art of value in order to ensure its appreciation – reinforces the division of the sensible that would refuse everyday inner city citizens the capacity to hold an ‘aesthetic attitude’, or to engage in a form of subjectiﬁcation by which they could actively contest the (under) estimation of their capacities, such as, in this case, being incapable of appreciating street art in situ. Street art as a self-consciously indexical and situated practice positions itself in relation to particular aspects of the urban environment, often with socio-political intent evident, in part, through its site of dissemination. In this sense, Dovey, Wollan, and Woodcock (2012) argue, street art and grafﬁti strives to ‘erode’ the distance between art and viewer, and to resist ready ‘incorporation’ into the formalized ﬁeld of ‘art’.

However, Burroughs (1988) suggests that it is the very ‘disruption’ of accepted categories that, paradoxically, constitutes ‘art’ itself.Irvine (2012) further asserts that a deﬁning feature of what we come to recognize as ‘high art’ is the work’s deautomisatization of established categories. Thus, the very resistance of street art to established categories may render it vulnerable to appropriation and commodiﬁcation as ‘high art’. We focus here on the transformation of public space provoked by the ephemeral dialogue of a series of relatively unknown artists/writers, over a period of 18 months (February 2013– September 2014) post the removal of a high-proﬁle piece of work by a recognized artist from the same site. While the ‘invaluable’ work in question – Banksy’s Slave Labour – received international media coverage when it ﬁrst appeared in May 2012, the new works incited by its removal in February 2013 were for the most part simply painted over shortly after they appeared, and were not reproduced in any of the extensive media, community or local government commentary.

Slave Labour’s removal was the catalyst for a series of often self-consciously egalitarian works of aesthetic protest. Rancie `re (2004) asserts that aesthetic protest can create ‘dissensus’, or ruptures in common sense, and a gap in the sensible, which works ultimately to show that what we see, according to our usual division of the sensible, could be otherwise – thus demonstrating the ‘contingency of the entire perceptual and conceptual order’ (May 2011, n.p.). Rancie `re extends the reach of aesthetics to encompass all those practices that make possible new commonalities of sense, and sense-making practices, created by ruptures in common sense itself. This is political, he argues, as politics is located in ‘disputes about the division of what is perceptible to the senses’ (Rancie `re 1998, 176).

Thus, as May (2011, n.p.) explains, ‘politics is itself aesthetic in that [AQ4] CCON 1073685—29/8/2015—RAJA.S—538231—Style 1 2S. Hansen 97 98 it requires a sharing of sense in common; art is not the exemplary site of sensory pleasure or the sublime but a critical break with common sense’. Rancie `re uses the term ‘division of the sensible’ to refer to the ‘system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made or done’ (Rancie `re 2004, 89).He argues that what is capable of being apprehended by the senses, in turn,provides for possible forms of participation (or exclusion from participation). The division of the sensible operates to allocate people to their proper coordinates, social categories and associated activities (Rancie `re 2004, 3).

Politics consists in the moments when those excluded from this social order, those who are ordinarily invisible or inaudible, engage in a form of aesthetic subjectivization that unsettles the ‘aesthetic coordinates of the community’ (Rockhill 2004, xiii) with the potential to transform the established division of the sensible. For Rancie `re, the police represent the institutional form of the maintenance of the division of the sensible, and indeed the policing of grafﬁti and street art operates to discourage people’s aesthetic and political engagement with work on the walls.Iveson (2014, 96) asserts that the policing of uncommissioned and unauthorized work on the walls of a city is achieved not just by its removal by authorities, but also via the discourses used to categorize work as ‘vandalism’ or as indecipherable nonsense, which effect ‘the reduction of grafﬁti writers to people who write but have nothing to say ... [and thus have] no place/ part in the city’.

Here, the operations of the ‘police’ refernot (just) to the actions of uniformed authorities, but rather to the broader operations of the symbolic constitution of the social that encourages people not to stop and look at that which should not be seen. ForRancie `re (1998, 29) the police is ... ﬁrst an order of bodies that deﬁnes the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that these bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. This injunction takes institutional form here in the material practices associated with the division of the sensible: in the local authority’s bufﬁng or erasure of work that is not to be seen; in the protection of authorized work permitted to remain; and in the relocation of work that is apparently too valuable to be seen and appreciated ‘in situ’ by the people.

Slave Labour Slave Labour (Figure 1, below) was produced during the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics, and at the height of the UK’s nationwide celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, marking 50 years of her reign as monarch. However, and despite the abundance of Jubilee-related paraphernalia, advertising and street decorations in London at the time of the work’s materialization, most of the media commentary was not overly concerned with what the work may have been intended to critique or signify but was rather initially restricted to a discussion as to whether or not it was ‘a genuine Banksy’. TheBBC (2012, n.p.) interviewed a range of ‘people on the street’ and academic experts and concluded that, ‘the image has all the hallmarks of a genuine Banksy’. Similarly, the media coverage of the later ‘theft’ of this work was largely contained to canvassing the community’s protest at its removal for auction in America and speculation as to the agents responsible for the work’s removal.

When Slave Labour was removed from the wall for private auction, the local community, represented by MP Lynne Featherstone, was vocal in asserting community [AQ5] CCON 1073685—29/8/2015—RAJA.S—538231—Style 1 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 3 99 146 147 ownership of, and rights to, the work. It was described as a gift to the community to whom, and where, it should be considered to rightfully belong: You have deprived a community of an asset that was given to us for free and greatly enhanced an area that needed it ... I call on you, and your consciences, to pull the piece from both potential sales and return it to its rightful place. (Tottenham 2013, n.p.) Protests were held at the site of removal, with residents brandishing signs that read ‘Bring back our Banksy’. Here,the protesters assert ownership, but not of the particular work, Slave Labour, but the work as ‘a Banksy’, or rather ‘our Banksy’ – an asset with a recognizable currency – and demand its restitution.

This protest was grounded in the community’s originally recognized claim over the work as belonging in – and to – its community of origin. However, as Young (2014, 128) points out, while communities’ experiences of, and belief in, ‘public space’ persists, the reality is that in many cities, apparently public spaces are legally comprised of a grid of privately owned spaces. This community protest, which attracted signiﬁcant media coverage, was initially successful, and on 23 February 2013 Slave Labour was withdrawn from auction in Miami, but the work eventually resurfaced in London where it was auctioned on 1 June 2013 by the Sincura group, representing the building’s owners, for £750,000. As with much street art, the positioning of the work is a crucial element in its (intended) signiﬁcation, now largely lost through its abstraction from context. Slave Labour was originally placed on the side of a Poundland discount store building in North London (Poundland is the largest discount retailer in Europe).

At the time, the store was heavily stocked with Jubilee merchandise, some of which – the plastic Union Jack ‘bunting’ emerging from the boy’s sewing machine – formed part of the original piece, before the local residents stripped it bare. This ‘product placement’ draws attention to the conditions of production of these disposable nationalistic icons. Slave Labour’s in situ location, and three-dimensional bunting, implicates the Poundland store and its customers. The precise placement of the work recalls a high-proﬁle public scandal over Poundland’s involvement in child sweatshop labour after a boy of seven was found to be working 100 hours a week, for just 7p an hour, in an Indian sweatshop that produced goods for the store (Mail 2010). Children are a vehicle often used by Banksy to deliver a message about the inherent inhumanity of deprivation, subjugation and violence – for instance, a child embracing a bomb in Bomb Hugger (2003); a child frisking a soldier in Stop and Search (2007).

These works juxtapose two images that clearly ‘do not belong’ together, but once joined connote something both innocent and sinister – thus delivering a political message in a comical or surprising manner. Although Slave Labour also depicts a child, it would appear that it departs from this established design logic. The signiﬁcance in this stylistic break perhaps marks the seriousness of the subject. Unlike the child frisking a soldier in Stop and Search, the child depicted in kneeling servitude in Slave Labour is representative of a multitude of children who exist under such conditions. The life-sized ﬁgure of the boy gives human form to the otherwise invisible 215 million child labourers aged between 5 and 17 years old worldwide (ILO 2010). The juxtaposition of the ﬁgure of a child with the activity of enforced labour should be as surprising, ridiculous and arresting as the depiction of a child embracing a bomb, or stop and searching a soldier. That it is not – that the viewer does not, at ﬁrst, see the boy as anything other than a veridical representation of a ﬁxed and determinate socio-political reality – is the shameful source of the work’s power.

We are all implicated in his subjugation. Initial visual responses: protest and loss The community protest against Slave Labour’s removal was also registered on the wall itself, with an explosion of grafﬁti, stencils and paste ups marking the site of removal, which was at that time visible as an unpainted and apparently still damp and freshly cemented section of the wall. These initial responses provide a visual cacophony of protest and loss (Figure 2). Much of this work is an index of community grief at the loss of Slave Labour. A large paste up of a weeping nun was positioned directly over the site of extraction; and a red heart was spray painted on the right-hand corner of the site, dripping red paint onto the wounded wall. Other pieces mark the level of community outrage at the ‘theft’ of the work Mono Print; for private auction, and the commodiﬁcation of Banksy’s ‘gift’ to the community. A stencilled paste-up reading ‘Caution: Thieves at Work’ abuts the left side of the space left by the extracted work; and dollar notes have been pasted around the perimeters of the site of extraction.

There are also pieces that reference Banksy’s other work, and that of associated artists. To the left of the wall is a small stencilled rat in the style of Banky’s inﬂuential French precursor, Blek le Rat, holding a tiny spray can and a sign repeating the demand of the community protesters. Another stencilled rat in similar proportion, but in the recognizable style of Banksy, sits at the same level to the right of the site of extraction. This rat holds a placard with a single-word protest – ‘Why?’ This is a democratic multiparty conversation. The contributors include both locally recognized street artists and unknown writers drawn to the site. Unlike curated gallery space, which offers the public a relatively passive position as viewer (though viewing is arguably always an active process),the extramural space of the city wall positions the public as interlocutors with the right to speak.

As with any ‘public’ conversation with multiple contributors, some of the ‘talk’ appears ‘off topic’ and made for the sheer sake of being a part of the conversation and making one’s mark; some delight in being ostentatious or crude and shocking (one writer’s contribution was a giant penis spray painted in lurid pink); some are hurried and scrawled; others are planned and articulate. However, the vast majority of marks on the wall made here appear site and topic speciﬁc, and designed to be received as evidence of the force of the community’s outrage at the removal of Slave Labour. This is not a Banksy After these initial visual protests had been white washed over by the local council, the wall remained blank for several months. The only piece that remained was the small stencilled rat to the right of the site of extraction, which,having been attributed to Banksy, was protected from erasure by a Perspex shield. However, on 17 April 2013, another monochrome stencil appeared, positioned directly over the original site of extraction (see Figure 3). This new stencil is a variation of the iconic Bad Panda stencil, often mistakenly attributed to Banksy.

The panda stands on the recognizable logotype of Banksy’s name thus apparently identifying Banksy as the author of this work;however,it wears a signboard that declares ‘This is not a Banksy’. The panda’s signboard is a reworked stencilled element borrowed from another of Banksy’s iconic stencils, Laugh Now (2003). The text on the panda’s signboard, ‘This is not a Banksy’,operates both to contradict the claim to authorship provided by Banksy’s tag and also to arrest the potential polysemy, or other possible connotations, of the pipe dangling from the panda’s mouth. The text provides a reference to the inscription, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (trans: This is not a pipe) from Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1928 – 1929). Magritte’s pipe both is, and is not, a pipe, in that it is a representation of a pipe – i.e. not a ‘real’ pipe. The panda provides the viewer with a similar puzzle, in that it appears to represent/be presented as a Banksy, but is simultaneously, by its own admission, not a ‘real’ Banksy.

If located within the context of gallery space, the image of the pipe alone may have effectively provided a reference to Magritte’s work (although it would lose the site speciﬁcity of the signiﬁcation). However, as street art located in public space, this overdetermination of signiﬁers (the image of the pipe in addition to the text on the signboard) makes this intertextual reference to Magritte’s observations on the treachery of images, or the persuasiveness of representation (or what we count as ‘real’, or authentic) more available to a community likely not versed in art history, creating a democratic ripple in the division of the sensible (Rancie `re 2004). A process of active interpretation is evident in the additions to the work made by members of the public, which demonstrate the capacity of viewers to appropriate and translate the work in their own terms. Indeed, on the morning after the panda stencil appeared, someone scribbled ‘Take me to America’ in a speech bubble above the panda’s head – a plea, or perhaps a challenge, added hurriedly to the stencil by a passer-by.

This request has particular resonance in the relatively socio-economically deprived context of Turnpike Lane, in North London, where few members of the neighbourhood would have the means to travel to America, thus marking the apparent injustice of Slave Labour’s cross-Atlantic journey by contrast to the projected aspirations of the panda who appears destined to remain on the wall until its erasure. Later additions to the stencil (see Figure 4) include a single question mark linked with a stroke of ink to the panda’s head, marking uncertainty as to the panda’s identity; a tiny starred halo drawn between the panda’s ears, perhaps mocking its status as a work to be revered; and the block-lettered demand, ‘FREE ART NOW!’ along the length of the panda’s right arm, adopting the form of a political slogan to refer to both to the wrongfully ‘captured’ Banksy and the unethical commodiﬁcation of the ‘free gift’ of street art. This piece introduces a note of uncertainty as to the certainty with which ‘a Banksy’ can be identiﬁed and problematizes the objectiﬁed, commodifed notion of ‘a Banksy’. It presents the viewer with a puzzle: it is a representation of a Banksy.

It is signed by Banksy. Yet it claims it is not a Banksy. These claims mark the potential repercussions of attributions of authorship to the survival of workin situ. If it were a Bansky, it would be immediately marked as of value (through the protection provided by a Perspex shield) and would be thus vulnerable to removal for proﬁt. If it were not a Banksy, it would, along with other works by less-recognized street artists, likely be subject to removal via bufﬁng by the local council. Selling out Another stencil, this time emulating the design of Slave Labour, was added to the wall the following week (see Figure 4). However, instead of producing cut-price jubilee bunting, CCON 1073685—29/8/2015—RAJA.S—538231—Style 1 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 7 295 the ﬁgure at the sewing machine now produces American dollars, which spew out from the machine onto the pavement in a three-dimensional pasted paper overﬂow.

The only major difference between Slave Labour and this new stencil is that the boy’s head has been replaced by an oversized nozzle of a spray can, which identiﬁes the piece as being work by the local street artist Cap Head. This work appears to provide further commentary on the complicit nature of commercially successful street artists in ‘selling out’. A week later, a large female cat standing upright was stencilled on the wall. The cat has a bright red sleeveless bodice that echoes the red heart sprayed free hand in relatively the same position beneath it as part of the works produced in initial response to the removal of Slave Labour. The red heart also recalls the red balloon that escapes the child in Banksy’s There is Always Hope (2007). That the cat stencil appears to contain elements of, or references to, other works by Banksy is perhaps further commentary on Banksy’s apparent complicity in creating an appetite for street art that now renders work vulnerable to theft for proﬁt. With a curious bent forward stance, the cat looms over the incarcerated Banksy rat trapped beneath its protective Perspex sheet.

The cat holds her index ﬁnger to her lips and catches the viewers’ gaze directly with a deﬁant, exaggerated ‘shhhh!’ as she appears to be about to remove either the stencilled rat’s protective Perspex shield, thus exposing it to the brutality of the elements, or perhaps to seize and consume the rat itself. The addition of the cat stencil to the wall creates a triangular composition linking the three works closest to the site of extraction. With tail raised, the cat appears to be spraying or defecating on the panda stencil that is now dwarfed in proportion to the cat. The panda’s scribbled speech bubble now forms an abject arc emanating from the cat that serves to link the two pieces, while the third piece is connected via the cat’s left hand plucking at the corner of the rat’s Perspex cover. The cat stencil thus enacts a creative reworking of existing elements on the wall in an apparent insult to the pre-existing works – both the ofﬁcially recognized Banksy rat stencil, and the avowedly fake Banksy panda stencil – further highlighting and subverting established notions of authorship, status, reverence and worth.

Mono Print; 391 392 Two weeks after the appearance of the cat stencil, all of the pieces then on the wall (save Banksy’s rat) were whitewashed over by the council. The boy in a panda suit The wall remained blank for three weeks after the council had painted over the prior works, then a new stencilled piece appeared directly over the original site of extraction (see Figure 5). It depicts a boy wearing a panda suit. The open face of a panda costume is ﬂung back to reveal a human face with lowered brows and a pensive expression. The panda boy sits cross-legged as he levitates above the street meditatively, with one hand on his knee while the other is raised to rest his chin on the back of his ﬁngers. The trajectory of his gaze, although apparently unfocused, falls across Banksy’s rat which is located to the lower right of the piece at the base of the wall. The boy’s panda suit appears to provide a reference to the panda stencil that previously occupied the same position on the wall.

That this is revealed to be a costume, or disguise, with a human ﬁgure concealed within, adds a further dimension to the ongoing visual exchange regarding authenticity, identity, authorship and worth,i.e. afurther representation of what remains hidden, like the earlier panda that also professed to be not what it seemed. That it appears to be the face of a despondent boy that is revealed is perhaps a reference to the forgotten boy depicted in servitude in Banksy’s original Slave Labour. This stencil remained untouched alone on the wall for eight weeks. It was only removed after several other large stencilled pieces were added to the wall. These new works were created with crude mass-produced stencils and accompanying slogans that were presumably regarded by the council as objectionable, or as not ‘adding value’ to the area, as their appearance saw the entire site (including the boy in a panda suit) swiftly painted over, restoring the blank wall. Five polystyrene replicas of Slave Labour were placed in a row against the site of extraction at 5.30 am on 1 June 2013, the morning of the London auction of Slave Labour (see Figure 6).

These new pieces are the work of Essex-based artist Laura Keeble, and are entitled Supply & Demand (After Banksy’s Slave Labour). These three-dimensional pieces have been produced in the exact proportions of Banksy’s original Slave Labour. Mono Print; 441 The slightly irregular square of the cut-out section of wall has been reproduced, as has the work’s plastic Union Jack bunting and the Perspex shield secured over the original to protect it. However,these pieces were carried away, presumably by opportunistic passers- by, just hours after they were placed against the wall. This work is both site and temporally speciﬁc. It was timed to appear as a concrete form of dissensus or aesthetic protest against the removal and commodiﬁcation of street art, on the very morning of the auction of Slave Labour. The title of the work, Supply & Demand, is an inversion of the usual form of the idiomatic microeconomic logic of demand and supply, thus providing another reference to the creation of demand or acquisitive greed, which is given further resonance by the swiftness with which the works were claimed and taken from the site.

Cut here The stencilled piece currently on the wall has outlasted all of the other prior works, and,at the time of writing, has been in position for 6 months (see Figure 7). It has survived road works and a series of adjacently scribbled tags by other writers, and it continues to resist removal by the council. The iconic scissors and dashed lines offer an invitation to ‘cut here’ of the kind more commonly seen on ‘cut out and keep’ sections of magazines and consumer packaging. This is a clear reference to the removal for proﬁt of Slave Labour, which was, quite literally, cut off the wall. This new stencil positions this act of removal within the sphere of consumption and the proﬁt economy. However, its consumer friendly design also provides a link to the apparent ‘gift’ or ‘bonus’ (to the keeper) of a ‘cut out and keep’ coupon – an unexpected supplement that operates to expose the ‘lack’ in the completeness or satisfaction provided by the original item. The consumer/viewer is positioned as wanting what they didn’t know they lacked until they received the ‘gift’ of something for nothing.

Although this piece references acquisitive consumer culture, it also presents a puzzle – why would one wish to remove a blank section of wall? Is the artist suggesting that an Mono Print; 489 490 arbitrary section of a whitewashed city wall is equivalent in worth to a Banksy removed for proﬁt? Is a reference to the production of want and acquisitive greed in the viewer- consumer in the commodiﬁcation of the ‘gift’ of street art? Does it allude to the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, by presenting an essentially invisible work (the blank wall framed by the dashed lines) as being of value, as something that one should want to ‘cut out and keep’? Is it a memorial to all of the works – of monetary value or not – that have been removed from the wall? In common with many of the other pieces that appeared on this site, the cut here stencil also references prior popular works by Banksy. A series of stencilled pieces of a similar scale appeared on various city walls in London, and in other European cities, in 2005.

Perhaps the most widely disseminated of Banksy’s variants on the cut here stencil was the giant version stencilled on the West Bank Barrier, which received worldwide media attention when it appeared in 2005. Many of Banksy’s works placed in Palestine a decade ago were extracted for private auction in 2010, despite Bansky protesting against their removal. Paradoxically, given its injunction to ‘cut here’, the work continues to resist removal. Its simplicity in design and mimicry of the form of a recognizable Banksy appears to protect it from bufﬁng by the council, although it has not, as yet, been placed under Perspex in ofﬁcial recognition of its worth or potential authorship. As such, it occupies a precarious position, protected from whitewashing via aesthetic judgement of its symbolic capital, but not from the elements or from potential destruction by others. The absence of a protective Perspex shield protects the cut here piece from efforts to remove the work for proﬁt, while its minimal design and replication of the form of ‘a Banksy’ appear to accord it a measure of temporary protection against erasure. Darling look, it’s a Banksy!

The most recent work added to the wall, in May 2014, is by the street artist Mobstr, produced in advance of his ﬁrst solo gallery show in East London. Discussion of the work on Twitter now describes the location simply as ‘the wall where a banksy was’. This very large piece covers the entire stretch of wall with painted lettering that animates the public’s imagined reactions to the work on the wall, though which of the works it Mono Print; references – the authentic Banksy rat, the Banksy-style cut here stencil, Mobstr’s own piece, or indeed the works beneath since erased as vandalism – is undetermined. This work does not obscure Banksy’s rat, which remains ﬁxed under Perspex to the wall, nor does it interfere with the cut here stencil, which at 6 months old is beginning to fade and ﬂake without any level of protection against the elements. The text on the wall arrests the viewer, with an exclamation and an injunction to look.

‘Darling look, it’s a Banksy!’ However, this is followed by the dismissive and downgrading retort, ‘Don’t be silly my dear, that’s just some vandalism’, to which the ﬁrst speaker concedes, ‘Oh right. Yes, of course’. This work provides a satirically banal commentary on mundane evaluations of the status, or worth, of street art. Like the prior works on the wall, it offers a critique of the objectiﬁcation and commodiﬁcation of street art;however,unlike prior works, it effects a sharp division between ‘a Banksy’ worth exclaiming over and looking at, and ‘some vandalism’ not worthy of viewers’ attention. This is accomplished by adopting the perspective of the imagined consumer-viewers of the work, who, as it turns out, are not looking at the work at all, but are simply concerned with categorizing it crudely as ‘a Bansky’ or as ‘vandalism’, in order to determine if it is worth looking at.

Mobstr thus creates a rupture in common sense by making visible the workings of the very consensus that holds together the ‘division of the sensible’ (Rancie `re 2004) that informs our practices of looking. Mobstr’s work parodies the symbolic operations of the police – the institutional form of the division of the sensible – which serve to encourage the people not to stop and look at that which should not be seen: The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done, but to keep moving ... Politics consists in ... reconﬁguring that space, what there is to do there, what there is to see or name. It is a dispute about the division of what is perceptible to the senses. (Rancie The aesthetic protest represented by Mobstr’s work is thus political, in Rancie `re’s sense, in that it animates a dispute about the self-evident facts of perception, and in so doing exposes our complicity with, and the contingency of, our taken-for-granted perceptual and conceptual order. In September 2014, an amendment was made to Mobstr’s piece.

A small paint roller has been used to crudely white out some of the letters in order to change the meaning of the dialogue presented on the wall (Figure 8). Mono Print; 587 588 The modiﬁed dialogue now reads, ‘do be ill’ rather than ‘don’t be silly’. This selective erasure translates the mocking middle-class admonishment, ‘don’t be silly’ into urban slang that contests the dismissiveness of the aesthetic/moral judgement animated by the original piece. Wiktionary provides a deﬁnition of ‘Ill’ as, ‘(hip-hop slang) Sublime, with the connotation of being so in a singularly creative way’ (Wiktionary 2014, n.p.).

Whilethe original phrasing of Mobstr’s piece provided satirical commentary on the viewer who is persuaded not to look at work once it has been positioned as vandalism, this new appropriation of the piece encourages the inner-city viewer to instead ‘be ill’ – and to actively engage with/in street art as a sublime and creative aesthetic activity, further disrupting the stultifying consensus or division of the sensible exposed by Mobstr’s piece, by ‘capping’ or ‘vandalising’ the work by selectively painting over portions of it. Conclusion The removal of Banksy’s Slave Labour for private auction was the catalyst for a transformation of public space, in generating a site for ongoing correspondence, and aesthetic protest, in the series of works that have appeared in its wake. Initial responses to the ‘theft’ of Slave Labour gave a forceful visual presence to the grief and outrage of the community, while later works provide a critical commentary on the circulation of street art as a commodity, but also highlight that these locally produced works are not part of this system of circulation, which in turn draws attention to the hierarchy of value imposed on works on the street.

Most of the works discussed here were painted over shortly after they appeared;however,they retain traces of already erased and apparently forgotten work, and provide a rich source of critical social commentary. They appear, on the whole, designed to be democratically accessible to, and readable by – and indeed to encourage the participation of – a ‘non-artistic’ community. This is achieved through various means, including the overdetermination of otherwise potentially exclusionary signiﬁers; via visual and textual references to Banksy, who has come to stand for the commodiﬁcation of street art; via references to consumer culture; and through the introjection of urban slang. The division of the sensible (Rancie `re 2004) takes form here in the material practices associated with the ‘policing’ of that which should and should not be seen: in the council’s whitewashing of objectionable work; in the protection accorded to work of value; and in the excision of work too valuable to be seen and appreciated ‘in situ’, for conservation and appreciation.

However, the dissensus invoked by this proliﬁc series of unruly works unsettles this division of the sensible, in that they urge the viewer to stop, to look, to interrogate the practices of looking that they are engaged in, and even to leave their own marks on the wall. As Rockwell (2011, 55 – 56) notes, viewers’ aesthetic engagement with such liminal art works is political as: works of art are collective phenomena that are politicised precisely through their production, circulation and interpretation in the social ﬁeld ... a work of art that is not engaged with is not strictly speaking a work of art ... a work only works and functions as art insofar as it has a social existence. These often self-consciously democratic works of aesthetic protest thus create ruptures in common sense which show that what we see, according to our usual ‘division of the sensible’, could be otherwise.

The practices of removal that street art and grafﬁti are commonly subject to – whether concerned with ‘restoring value’ to a community, by its destruction and erasure, or with ‘recognising value’ by its preservation, protection and ultimately removal for private proﬁt – yield divergent and differently recognized conditions of possibility for the public CCON 1073685—29/8/2015—RAJA.S—538231—Style 1 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 13 589 637 spaces they (re)generate. Removal may be ultimately productive and generative in that it provides a ‘clean slate’ for future work, and may give rise to a proliferation of new images that provoke and foster visual dialogue and correspondence. The ephemerality and material impermanence of street art is thus a necessary if paradoxical condition for it to survive and persist, as such (Young 2014) however much its recent incorporation into the category of high art, and removal for proﬁt, may appear to threaten this foundational ‘in situ’ deﬁnition.

If erasure is necessary for grafﬁti and street art to thrive, perhaps this historically recent form of removal for proﬁt may also prove productive, rather than stultifying. Our thanks for the insightful critical feedback provided by two anonymous reviewers. Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author. Notes 1. The original Bad Panda was produced in 2005 by the French designer Julien d’Andon, who designed the panda for French brand KULTE. 2. Bansky himself produced a playful museum located work referencing The Treachery of Images, by framing a ‘real’ working pipe integral to the museum, and adding an inverted variant of Magritte’s inscription, which observes that, ‘This is a pipe’. Notes on contributor BBC. 2012. ‘Banksy’ Boy Worker Image on Poundland Shop Wall. BBC News. London, May 16, 2012. Accessed August 1, 2014. BBC. 2013. Banksy’s No Ball Games Mural Removed from Tottenham Wall. BBC News. London, July 26, 2013.

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Question: What is written on the sign on the mural by graffiti artist Banksy that was cut out of a wall in Tottenham, London in July 2013?
Answer: No Ball Games