Banksy, the UK’s best-known street artist, might be getting too famous for the good of his creations. Their appearance provokes some odd reactions. Of the nine animal paintings he made across London over consecutive days in the past weeks, one — a howling wolf, painted on an old satellite dish — has been stolen, while another, a rhinoceros appearing to mount an abandoned car, has been tagged by another graffiti writer, and the car itself has vanished.
A mural from 1999 called “The mild, mild west”, which shows a teddy bear hurling a Molotov cocktail at policemen, prefigures later famous images such as the “Flower Bomber”, a masked rioter hurling a bunch of flowers, created on the West Bank wall. By using narrative and sociopolitical commentary like this, Banksy diverges from the tradition of graffiti, which is largely calligraphic.