So that was all a bit bonkers wasn’t it? The Banksy bandwagon rolls into town, and everyone goes crazy for it. The media look for Banksy related stories left, right and centre, whilst people from literally all over the world queue for hours and hours to get into the Bristol city museum, a place that’s sadly often more noted for its rain sheltering abilities than its content. Not only that, but only a few months beforehand, similar scenes were seen for the graffiti/street art extravaganza at the Royal West of England Academy just up the road from the museum, where 50 graf-urban-street artists were let loose on the walls of that august institution.

So, graffiti officially seems to have moved out of the shadows and into the mainstream in our city, but what’s next? Beyond the millions the show is said to have brought to the city’s economy, what effect has Banksy hysteria had on the graffiti/street art scene in the city, and what might it do for it in the future? Moreover, what has it told us about the man himself?

Well, to state the obvious first, the show has caused people to become a lot more interested in the graffiti they see around them, Banksy or otherwise. Artists now regularly tell of people asking if they’re Banksy when they’re out painting. It almost gets in the way of the work itself at times. The media spent a lot of time during the show looking for Banksy related stories, but the debate they caused has sparked a bit of wider thought, culminating in the council itself saying they’ll let the public vote on what graffiti to keep and what to wash off in the future. Probably an unworkable policy in reality and one in fact that seems to run against what graffiti was originally about. Graffiti writers generally write for themselves and for their friends. If authority doesn’t like it, they don’t care, but by the same token, if authority does like it, they’re not especially bothered either. As 3Dom wrote on the wall of the RWA show; ‘We’d do this anyway’.
Moreover, graffiti isn’t meant to be a permanent thing and if the council starts preserving people’s work on walls, then it risks stagnating the scene and doing more harm than good. More legal walls or ‘public art galleries’ are what this city needs. It’s great that more people are interested in this scene now, but if people started to get more interested in fine art galleries all of a sudden, the galleries wouldn’t start organising votes on what work to hang and what to paint over in grey paint. So, possibly not the best knock on effect of the Banksy show.

One thing that’s also come along with this increased public awareness of graffiti and street art though, is increased commercialisation of the scene. ‘Live painting’ has gone from something only seen by late night taxi drivers in dark side streets to a virtual licensing requirement for any large event. Interestingly, it’s not so much the original graffiti artists themselves that have benefited from this as much as people who were just fans. Simply buying photoshop, a scalpel and some thick card seems to mean you can immediately call yourself an ‘urban artist’ these days, and some real crap has started being churned out. But the increased interest in and demand for ’street art’ has seen an audience for this sort of thing spring up pretty rapidly, so some events have become like odd, sanitised theme parks for the culture that inspired it all.

Perhaps that’s no bad thing though. The ridiculous bubble that grew in the art market over the last few years as people looked for ‘the next Banksy’ risked turning people’s head towards the cash, rather than concentrating on the quality of their work. So if new people can come in and provide space for new artists to paint whilst being photographed by people with Flickr accounts, perhaps it shelters the actual graffiti writers from some of the attention, allowing them to keep doing genuinely new and interesting work.

So what of the ‘Banksy backlash’ then, with people accusing him of selling out by moving from the streets into a museum, and some of his street pieces getting vandalised during the show? Well, that mostly seemed to fade away pretty quickly. Those who accused him of selling out missed the obvious joke behind the whole thing. Here’s a man who for years was chased, arrested and criticised in the local press for his ‘vandalism’, suddenly being given the run of the council’s biggest museum, taking the mickey out of its exhibits in the process. It’s one of the biggest gags the man’s pulled off. The only selling out Banksy’s done is with sales of his prints, which have been earning hundreds of thousands for a few years now anyway. It’s not like he ever intended to stay on the wrong side of the law for that long either, a lot of his bigger early pieces in Bristol used to be done with the owner’s permission.

For all its impact though, did people in Bristol really care that much about the show? I’ve spoken to loads of people who you would have expected to have gone to it, who said that they never got round to it, or weren’t really that bothered. Similarly, taking a summer break from the blog, we queued up a load of content on old Banksys in Bristol, partly because it was easy, partly because they’d always meant to be blogged, but mainly because we thought people might have been interested, given the show was on. We got more complaints about doing that than pretty much anything else we’ve blogged. People weren’t that interested in Banksy, and wanted to stick with things that were new and interesting going on around the city. Bristol’s not a place to get that worked up about anything really, but there was a definite element of ‘well done Rob, now what else is going on?’ from people across the city.

One thing the show has done though, is shone a bit of a light on the man himself. Always self deprecating, yet totally clear on what he wanted to do, Banksy has become more of a brand than a person these days. Remember all the talk of how only a tiny handful of people knew about the show until it opened? It was all just part of the PR drive, loads of people knew about it, for one thing it’s not like he put the whole show up himself now is it? For all the talk of ‘who is he?’, he did an interview for The Times, gave exclusive access to the Evening Post and personally invited hundreds of people to the opening night. So did Banksy the person come back home, or was it Banksy the business?

Perhaps tying in with that, during the show Ronald McDonald appeared over the entrance to the museum, makeup run from crying and an empty bottle by his side, looking like he was going to jump. What was he there for? Was it just a quick visual gag? Another attack on corporate America? Or was there another message there, perhaps a self portrait of an artist who for a few months became the very thing he’s spent years parodying, or a comment on what has happened to a scene that’s suddenly had a spotlight turned on it and may never be the same again?

Be it police attention or public acclaim, the Bristol graffiti scene has been through some pretty interesting times since it arrived from New York in the early 1980s. Whatever may happen to it once the spotlight fades yet again, one thing’s for certain, it’ll keep going whether people are looking at it or not.

Ronnie Jotun writes for the Bristol Graffiti Blog at http://bristolgraffiti.wordpress.com