The re-contextualization game – which characterizes street art (the addition of marks, images and words changing the meaning of a space or object) – is a difficult one to play because there is always the danger that someone will re-contextualize the re-contextualized. Take, for example, MBW’s recycling of Warhol images as featured in British street artist Bansky’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop, which we talk about here. Or even the eternal regress of the idea of cool in local music scenes, which we talk about here. When working with irony, there’s always one more removed layer to retreat to. That’s why it is oddly satisfying to see that local New York graffiti artists are scribbling on Banksy’s work, which happens to be popping up around the city as his film is being promoted. Is the defacing of Banksy’s work a defense of graffiti territory, a reaction to Banksy’s recent commercial leanings, or just the instinct of a movement characterized by a constant hunger to up the “anti?” If I were Banksy, I would deface my own work, and then deface that, cover that up with a new work, and then deface that. What is more anti-art than never knowing what or where the artwork is, or when it is done, or who made it?

Image: Banksy’s “Ikea Punk,” about graffiti posers,  which was defaced by graffiti artists claiming Banksy was a poser. Photo via BP Mag.

Update: Banksy at work, or just paranoia: some of the British artist’s prints have been stolen from a SOHO gallery.

Update2: This post mysterious disappeared and I had to re-post. Banksy?