TIME OUT LONDON has just released a “collectors item” issue featuring a cover story BANKSY interview with matching poster to boot (order HERE). Have a read:

AN INTERVIEW WITH BANKSY
By Ossian Ward | Time Out London, Mon Mar 1 2010

Reclusive street artist, Banksy, comes out of the shadows to tell Time Out about his notoriety, ongoing graffiti wars and increasing the value of London property. But not to plug his new film.

Many people claim to have done so, but I have indeed met – albeit accidentally – the real Banksy, an unremarkable, medium-build man wearing glasses, at an East End graffiti jam a few years ago. However, direct access to him is strictly limited nowadays. Banksy nevertheless agreed to an exclusive interview to settle some scores and to create a brand new piece of work for Time Out’s cover, in which he revisits some of his classic pieces featuring royal Foot Guards variously pissing or spraying graffiti on walls. After lots of waiting and furtive messaging, the trail having gone cold many times, he responded to our questions from his bomb-proof bunker. But like Kirk Douglas, I had to make sure that this really was Spartacus first…

Is this definitely you? After all, some hacks have been duped into unofficial interviews with imposters, naming no names (the Guardian Guide)…
I wish you were talking to an imposter. I don’t have much of a personality, so it’s difficult to “be” one. Also I want to talk up the film, but I don’t want to talk about it – I’m worried I might ruin the ending. Can we just run a blank page that people can draw on?

Can you at least say why you’ve dubbed this the first ever street-art ‘disaster movie’? Does that mean it’s your last film?
I consider this whole experience to be a disaster on many levels. I think it will be known as my first movie, the one that didn’t lead to a career in filmmaking.

First came the art, then your move into animatronics, then a feature film… does that make you the next Walt Disney?
I’d never thought about it like that. I guess opening a giant theme park for vandals would be next. I was at a holiday camp when ìLicense to Illî by the Beastie Boys came out. Practically every kid had a VW badge hanging around their necks that they’d stolen off a car in town. I remember the police raided the camp and the mayor came and gave us a stern lecture by the paddling pool.

Now that your mugshot has appeared in the paper, do you get recognised on the street?
I know a couple of years ago a bloke claimed he was Banksy to get into a nightclub in Shoreditch and when word went around he got a kicking off some other graffiti writers. It’s in my interest not to comment on any of the photos doing the rounds.

What’s this battle with Robbo and Drax all about, then?
I didn’t deliberately start a battle with Robbo – have you seen the size of him? In the ’90s him and Drax were infamous enough that we’d even heard about them in Bristol. The truth is I didn’t paint over a piece that said “Robbo”, I painted over a piece that said “nrkjfgrekuh”. But either way, I don’t buy into the idea a wall “belongs” to a certain writer, or anyone else for that matter.

Traditional graffiti writers have a bunch of rules they like to stick to, and good luck to them, but I didn’t become a graffiti artist so I could have somebody else tell me what to do. If you’re the type who gets sentimental about people scribbling over your stuff, I suggest graffiti is probably not the right hobby for you.

You are accused by the graffiti community of selling them out? How do you plead?
It’s hard to know what “selling outî means – these days you can make more money producing a run of anti-McDonald’s posters than you can make designing actual posters for McDonald’s.

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.” Click HERE to continue reading at Time Out London…

Leave it to BANKSY to roll out the premiere of his “EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP” documentary in an unused London subway tunnel beneath the Waterloo train station—AND manage to keep the whole thing secret till now. Billed as “London’s newest, darkest, and dirtiest purpose-built cinema,” the venue is adorned with new Banksy art installations and rows of couches and theater seats, and even features a “popcorn stall, lounge bar, and stunning temporary toilet facilities.” Daily screenings will take place at 6PM & 9:30PM daily until March 4th. Book your tickets HERE now…

Increasingly, harsh zero tolerance policies towards graffiti and other offenses in US schools are seeing grade school-aged children being treated with harsh adult-style police discipline inside the actual classroom. This problem was exemplified when, incredibly, a 12-year-old NYC girl with a spotless record was physically arrested in her classroom for doodling on her desktop this month:

GIRL’S ARREST FOR DOODLING RAISES CONCERNS ABOUT ZERO TOLERANCE
By Stephanie Chen, CNN February 18, 2010

(CNN) — There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 ” scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker.

Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.

Alexa’s hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and — the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl — her classmates.

“They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn’t believe it,” Alexa recalled. “I didn’t want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I’m a bad person.” Click HERE to continue reading at CNN…

“Better Together” for Match.com from FriendsWithYou on Vimeo.

The newest bit of animation from our buddies FriendsWithYou…

What has to be the final nail in the “Street Art” coffin was driven in last weekend by none other than MR. BRAINWASH (aka: “The Christian Audigier of Street Art”) when he opened his massive, self-produced “Icons” show in a rented space (which, ironically, was once a real art gallery, pre-recession) in the heart of Chelsea. As the subject of Brit Street Art king Banksy’s recent docu-parody film, “Exit Through The Gift Shop,” MBW has been the focus of much hype and speculation as his presence finally seeps into the fairly muddy stream of mainstream consciousness. Last week’s Wall Street Journal article articulated this particularly well:

“Fueling the buzz around Mr. Brainwash is that no one knows exactly who the 44-year-old is. Some Web sites have speculated that he may be an invented character, part of a performance-art hoax. Others think he may, in fact, be the popular British street artist Banksy, whose face has never been shown on camera … “Maybe I am Banksy,” says the enigmatic artist, who says his real name is Thierry Guetta and speaks in a thick French accent. “Maybe not.”

Of course, the most amusing part of all this dumbfounded hypothesizing is how real—and accessible—Mr. Brainwash actually is. Far from actually being Banksy or any other legitimately mysterious street art phantom, MBW is simply Thierry Guetta, aka “French Terry,” a Los Angeles-based French transplant who cut his teeth in recent years by following around the architects of the scene, Shepard Fairey and Banksy, camera in hand, capturing film of them in action for what was to be his own documentary on street art. In the process, Guetta was inspired to follow in the footsteps of his idols and ultimately passed through the looking glass, assuming the incredibly ridiculous moniker of “Mr. Brainwash.” Guetta then forged a visual identity for himself by mining literally every Pop Art gimmick of the past 50 years and running it through the stylistic filter of Fairey and Banksy to achieve his own heavily derivative results. Of course, this would all be an act of genius (or at least considerable humor) if French Terry was doing it as a grand act of parody, skewering the scene he had been so closely observing for all its inherent gimmickry and blasé appropriation. In the process of his conversion, however, French Terry, like the computers in so many Sci-Fi tales, became self-aware, and convinced that he himself was in fact a true artist and the bona-fide “next big thing” of street art. Enter Banksy…

Convinced that Terry—due to his own directorial ineptitude or self-possessed drive to become a street artist himself—would never finish the original film as planned and recognizing the inherent absurdity of the would-be filmmaker’s hilarious conversion, Banksy did what he does best and flipped the tables by taking possession of Guetta’s reels and creating a new documentary with his own team. Focused not on himself or Shepard Fairey as originally intended, “Exit Through The Gift Shop” would instead chronicle French Terry’s amazing transformation as a metaphor for the absurdity of the street art world and Banksy’s own brilliant “take a sucker for all they’re worth” ethos. The result was billed by Banksy as “The world’s first street art disaster movie,” with the film’s trailer showing footage of Terry spilling paint in his truck and walking into signposts while quotes like “in a world with no rules, one man broke them all,” flashed across the screen. You could almost hear the sound of journalists scratching their heads at screenings in Park City (Sundance) and Berlin.

Dateline, February 12, 2010: Following up his self-produced June 2008 one man show in LA (that was itself a direct copy of Banksy’s epic solo show there two years earlier) that was held in a cavernous old abandoned TV studio facilitated by his family’s extensive real estate holdings and chronicled in depth here on Supertouch, French Terry unveils the East Coast installment of his street art apocalypse with the opening of “Icons” at a massive rented defunct gallery space in Chelsea. Featuring an equally absurd array of Warhol-derived celebrity portraiture (using silkscreen and splatter paint along with broken 45 records as his prime medium), mixed with Claes Oldenburg-style object sculpture, and exact replicas of Banksy-style found old master hotel room paintings featuring modern ironic interventionist touches (ie: P-Diddy raising the roof in a Renoir style oil painting) with prices ranging up to the—hold your breath—$300,000 mark, the show was pure MBW through and through. And while serious art collectors scoffed, knowing that the only reason French Terry was going rogue to such extent in NYC (aside from the obvious financial gains of having no gallery to cut in on the take) was because no serious art gallery would touch him, new money suckers and socialites were lining up to fork over the green to invest in the street art equivalent of Bear Stearns. Of course, MBW loyalists would cite his sold out show of work at SoHo’s Opera Gallery late last year as evidence of a real art career, but Opera is simply a tourist art gallery dabbling heavily in so-called “lowbrow” and “street art” of late (with a heavily funded/deluded client base, no less).

So what’s the take away here? Do we love French Terry for what he is? Deride him for who he thinks he is? Embrace him for bringing laughter to our hearts and lips? In the end, we at Supertouch are left to mine our own previous coverage of MBW’s Los Angeles show to deliver an apt closing moral:

“To call last nite’s opening of newly minted and ridiculously named “artist” MR BRAINWASH an “art show” would be a disservice to artists everywhere and even Mr Brainwash himself. Instead, let’s call it what it really is: a grand art prank of epic proportions. A heist. A spoof. A joke. Or maybe just the biggest, funnest, sloppiest high school art fair of all time … In the words of one of LA’s most pioneering street art provocateurs, Skullphone, “if Disneyland wanted to open a street art ride, this is what they’d have done.”

Our prediction for French Terry’s next big project? Our money’s fully on the Mr. Brainwash clothing line by Christian Audigier. It’s just too bad Michael Jackson’s not around to see it (or this show), he would have eaten it up…

HAVE A LOOK:

Photos by Rich Drogpa, Brian Jung, and D-Knatt

KAWS, anyone???…

MBW maximizes profit on his commissioned Madonna portrait…

…and lays rightful claim to the title of “Boy Toy”

MBW rakes it in off the Material Girl…

The best piece in the show…

French Terry holds court before his masses…

Unsurprisingly, our man BANKSY didn’t show up:

“An apparent press conference by “Exit Through the Gift Shop” director, and mysterious street artist, Banksy was canceled in Berlin today. A subject of the film, which debuted last month at the Sundance Film Festival, Banksy remains an incognito artist. He issued a video statement that was shown prior to the press screening of his movie on Sunday at the Berlinale, in lieu of a press conference.

He started by saying, in a recorded message, “Unfortunately I can’t be with you today, so I am speaking from my home in England via satellite link.”

“I guess my ambition was to make a film that would do for graffiti art what ‘Karate Kid’ did for martial arts, a film that would get every school kid in the world picking up a spray can and having a go,” said a silhouetted figure, identified as Banksy, in a digitally altered voice on the short video message. He added, “As it turns out, I think we might have made a film that does for street art what ‘Jaws’ did for water sking.” Click HERE to continue reading at INDIE WIRE…

“Liberated” billboard in Jersey City by RON ENGLISH…

Supertouch’s own RON ENGLISH is currently running loose in south TEXAS where the sight of a pasture full of nice, innocent cows just grazing away, rekindled his relentless urge to paint everything in sight. The result? A field full of ironically sloganed, camouflauged cows, and a death sentence from Peta, whose bounty hunters are reportedly stalking the Jersey-based painter as we write…

Ron is known to paint cows of all types…

In town for the opening of his eponymous solo show at MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY, Japan’s YOSHITOMO NARA just couldn’t help himself in the Subway at Union Station when the graffiti urge overtook him. Unfortunately, New York’s “Finest” don’t exactly see drawings as “art” when they’re on walls instead of paper and the delicate art star spent two days in the slammer. Ouch:

POP ARTIST YOSHITOMO NARA ARRESTED FOR GRAFFITI IN NEW YORK
March 10, Japan Today

Yoshitomo Nara, a contemporary Japanese pop artist known for sculptures and paintings of doe-eyed figures, was arrested in late February for tagging graffiti in the Union Square subway station, a New York Police Department official said Monday.

Nara was arrested at 3:10 a.m. on Feb 27 and charged with criminal mischief, possession of graffiti instruments, making graffiti and resisting arrest, detective Martin Speechley told Kyodo News in a phone interview. An official at a New York art gallery where Nara’s exhibits are currently on display said the artist has already been released.

Nara, 49, who lives and works in Tochigi Prefecture, was in New York for a solo exhibition of his work at the Marianne Boesky Gallery that runs Feb 28 through March 28. The online edition of Art in America magazine said Nara was caught tagging a graffiti portrait of two Japanese friends in the subway station and he was optimistic about his two days in lockup.

It was ‘‘a nice experience in my life,’’ the artist was quoted as saying. He said the environment in which he found himself was like something in the movies. Nara emerged on the art scene during Japan’s pop art movement in the 1990s and has held solo exhibitions worldwide. His works are on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Click HERE to read more…

Supertouch’s own SHEPARD FAIREY was arrested for alleged vandalism claims while attempting to enter the grand public opening of his first museum solo show at the INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART/BOSTON last nite. Currently he’s out on bail and awaiting a court appearance in Boston on Monday:

“A street artist famous for his red, white and blue “Hope” posters of President Obama was arrested in Boston, where he was wanted on warrants for tagging property with graffiti.

Shepard Fairey, 38, was arrested Friday night on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art. Fairey was scheduled to deejay a kickoff event at the museum for his first-ever solo exhibition, called “Supply and Demand.”

Two warrants were issued for Fairey on Jan. 24 after police determined he’d tagged property in two locations with graffiti based on the Andre the Giant street art campaign from his early career, Boston Police Officer James Kenneally said Saturday.

Fairey, of Los Angeles, is scheduled to be arraigned on the misdemeanor charges Monday in Brighton District Court, said Jake Wark, a spokesman for the Suffolk District Attorney. Wark said Fairey would also be arraigned on a default warrant related to a separate graffiti case in the Roxbury section of Boston.

Fairey has spent the last two weeks in the Boston area installing the ICA exhibit, giving public talks and creating outdoor art, including a 20-by-50 foot banner on the side of City Hall, according to a statement issued Saturday by the ICA.

The museum described the reason for Fairey’s arrest as “his efforts posting his art in various areas around the city.”

“We believe Shepard Fairey has made an important contribution in the history of art and to popular thinking about art and its role in society,” the statement said. “We are enthusiastic to be working with him and are pleased to be showing the first museum retrospective of his work.”

The museum said Fairey was released a few hours after his arrest, but that could not immediately be confirmed by authorities. A California lawyer who has represented Fairey in the copyright case didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment on the arrest.” Click HERE to continue reading…