Banksy on the Inside

Barry Hoggard (a daily must-read, if you're not already) highlighted this last week, and the always-ahead-of-the-crowd Wooster Collective has been all over it. Even the BBC got there before I did (I never was all that quick), but in case you missed them elsewhere, below are some images of the secretive graffiti artist Banksy's work on the highly controversial security wall Israel is building. The Guardian wrote about it this way:

Israel describes it as a vital security barrier, while the UN says it's illegal. But as far as the guerrilla graffiti artist Banksy is concerned, the 425-mile long barrier that separates Israel from the Palestinian territories is a vast concrete canvas too tempting to resist.

Here's a sampler:

Banksy (see his website here and his rational for the wall paintings here) has been in the news before. He's the artist, you may recall, who was hanging his own work in major museums. Wikipedia summarizes the project:

Another of Banksy's tricks involved hanging a piece of his own Art in London's Tate Modern, and as of March 2005, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History. In May 2005 Bansky's version of primitive cave painting depicting a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping cart was found hanging in the British Museum.

For me, his pranks seem good-natured enough (although, I hope he doesn't decide to take on galleries), but it was this exchange he posted on his website between himself and a resident of Ramallah that opened my eyes to the humanity in his work:

Old man: You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful.

Me [Banksy]: Thanks

Old man: We don't want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall, go home.

Here's one more image: