"The whole thing boils down to class warfare... People all over the world are wondering why they did that to 5Pointz. My answer is, why not?"

"Do we really think some landlord is going to give a damn about the culture of the working class? This was an art form invented by the children of the working class, not children with last names like Trump or Rockefeller."

"There are hardly any spots left in the city for graffiti writers... It’s going to mean that everybody’s going to be fighting for space. And you know what happens if they don’t have space to express themselves."

"We are supposed to be the vandals, but this is the biggest rag and disrespect in the history of graffiti."

The work of 1,500 artists, whited out overnight.

Banksy graffitis protest against the NYT for rejecting his op-ed mocking the new World Trade Center tower.

I got to his website from the NY Post, via Drudge, which takes at face value the statement "Today’s piece was going to be an op-ed column in the New York Times. But they declined to publish what I supplied. Which was this..."


Banksy's post says it was to be an op-ed, but it's not in the format of an op-ed. It's presented in the form of a front-page news story about the artist's opinion, not a column written by the artist, so I take it the mock-up of the NYT is just another artwork, a viral promo pointing to his graffiti (a photograph of which you can see at the first link, above).

But let's read the text anyway. Part of me resists artists who elbow me for attention, but that's not the part of me writing this blog post. We might ask: If this is in fact a rejected op-ed, why was it rejected? Well, obviously, it says "you've got to do something about the new World Trade Center," and that's too close to saying: Knock this one down too. It continues: "That building is a disaster," and how can you not think he's trying to do edgy comedy calling up memories of the disaster of September 11, 2001? The next line makes that obvious: "Well no, disasters are interesting."

Yeah, Artist Boy? Well, take your interestingness and go to hell.

That's my reaction after reading 2 paragraphs. But then I read on, and guess what? Artist Boy, self-professed lover of interestingness, goes on to natter out criticisms of the building that have all been aired extensively in the media as the reconstruction of the site has been debated over the years. Is Banksy familiar with any of that, or did he just wander over to America to start talking off the top of his head as if any of his thoughts are probably interesting?

I know. There seems to be a paradox: Why am I blogging about this if I don't find it interesting? It can't be interesting to say something is not interesting, can it? Yes, I'd say it is, if people are already acting as if it is interesting.

"Teen terror suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scrawled a confession inside the boat he was hiding in..."

"... before cops grabbed him last month, according to a report Thursday.:

The note was written in pen on a bullet-riddled wall of the cabin, and reportedly said America’s military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was the reason behind the deadly April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon, sources told CBS News. The message reportedly said the victims — three killed and more than 260 injured — were collateral damage similar to Muslims who've died in U.S.-led wars.

“When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the note said....

Tsarnaev, 19, also reportedly wrote that he didn’t mourn older brother and alleged bombing mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in an earlier gun battle with cops. He referred to him as a martyr in paradise....

"Who is so devoted to the park, and to the rules of grammar..."

"... that he or she would break the law to correct these mistakes?"

"Montreal artist Jennifer Pawluck, 20, was arrested yesterday morning after posting a photo of a piece of anti-police street art..."

"'I was walking around the neighborhood. My friend told me to look and I took a photo of it,' Pawluck said. 'I never made any threat or anything, so I don't really regret it. They're the ones who freaked out.' But Montreal police doesn't take Instagram uploads lightly: 'All I can say is that a person has been arrested for making threats on the internet,' said police spokesperson Dany Richer."

MORE: Here.

The photo in question depicts a hand-drawn image of Ian Lafrenière with a gunshot wound to the head flanked by the words “Ian Lafrenière” and “ACAB” — a popular graffiti acronym that stands for “all cop[per]s are bastards.”

The Oberlin incident.

"Oberlin Cancels Classes After Figure in KKK Robes Spotted Near African Heritage House" — so read the headlines yesterday. The article referred also to "a string of hate-related incidents at Oberlin," such as graffiti on Black History Month posters crossing out the word "Black" and scrawling in the N-word.

But who's the culprit and what's the real motive? I avoided blogging this story when I saw it yesterday because I expected an update, and here it is:

According to a person with access to the faculty mailing list, faculty members had been told—"unofficially," (i.e., not through official channels)—that "the investigation into this incident was dropped when it was discovered that the person responsible was someone within the MRC [the Multicultural Resource Center], who would be disciplined internally"; according to conversations with other members of the Oberlin community, this appears to be a widespread, and widely-believed, rumor. (The same source, who asked to remain anonymous, claims that the MRC, whose former director, Eric Estes, is now the Dean of Students, has been criticized for the amount of student college money it receives, and that its leadership has "had trouble justifying how many campus coordinators they have on staff.")

When you don't know who has said/written/done something, don't take the expression at face value. Where the identity of the speaker/writer/actor is hidden, think about who has a motive, who has an interest.

How many class hours were taken from tuition-paying students (who also pay the fees that support, perhaps lavishly, things like the Multicultural Resource Center)? Impulsive, biased assumptions are made by the authorities and normal lesson plans give way to a teach-in about a problem that may not even be the problem. A university should model intelligence and reason.

Will we ever learn the real story? Do the students even care?

"The community feels that this art was given to us, for free, and it's now been taken away to be sold for huge profit. I'm very angry about the Banksy going - we want our Banksy back!"

"The street art was stencilled onto the side of a Poundland shop in Wood Green in 2012 but disappeared last week." The chunk of wall has now been removed and is up for auction where it's expected to sell for over half a million dollars.

Poundland say they are not behind the removal of the artwork, which was behind a protective perspex screen when it was taken. A spokesman said: 'We're not responsible for either selling or removing the Banksy mural. We're currently investigating.'

A Met Police spokesman said the removal has not been reported as a crime.

There's a legal and a moral issue here. I assume that it was a crime to put the art on the wall and that whoever owns the wall owns the graffiti and can sell it. If these works are worth so much money and it was my wall, I'd want to have it removed before somebody stole it or damaged it. You'd think other graffiti artists would be tempted to paint over it.

But if removing these things is frowned upon by the very people who love it and imbue it with value, then it's not worth so much. I could picture the artist seeing this kind of wrangling over the commerce and preservation to be part of the artwork and part of the publicity game around the artwork. No one item is of real value to him. It's about giving things away, and the artwork itself depicts a child engaged in slave labor. It's all about the art. The people's emotional attachment to it and their despair as they lose it are all part of the art.

Or so I presume. Sorry, I haven't really been following the Banksy thing. It's the sort of thing I would normally be interested in, but somehow I've averted my eyes from this character. Here's his Wikipedia page if you need to catch up on him or correct me on my mispresumptions.

Racist, sexist graffiti in the new World Trade Center bathrooms.

Port Authority police are now investigating. Who wrote these things? The construction workers?

“Such slurs are offensive and have no place at the World Trade Center site or elsewhere,” PA spokeswoman Lisa MacSpadden said. “The Port Authority has zero tolerance for those who demonstrate intolerance.”

The construction company said it has an anti-vandalism policy which it would "reiterate" to its crews.

Hardhats who toil on the site said the foul writing on the walls is a fact of life at all job sites — and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

Black construction workers, victims of some of the most repugnant scrawls, were furious but said they don’t dare complain when they see the N-word.

“You ask any black person on the job, and they’ll say, ‘What can you do about it?’ ” said an outraged Tyson Patterson, 35, of the Bronx. “You talk and you get fired. I have to be political and pretend it doesn’t bother me.”