Towards the end of the nineties and the first few years of the millennia the underground art scene in London went though some harsh times. The collective efforts of the Big Labels and the youth marketing industry (die please) and their dastardly attempt to suck the soul completely from the Graffiti identity are to blame. Like hairy-backed child rapists they held it down, kicking and screaming, ignoring its pleas for help and forcing it to become an integral part of their totally deluded attempts to create a ‘UK Hip Hop scene’ (FAIL).

Don't scream...

Even total fucking social outcasts like Known were making a wage spraying people’s interiors and shitty LP inserts. On the other side of the spectrum we had complete lunatics like OKER going back underground and taking the concepts of ‘tagging every single thing in sight’ and ‘destroying millions of pounds worth of public property’ to dizzying new heights. Graffiti and art had fallen out and become so separated nobody from either side was willing to try and re-bridge the gap. Even when he started getting some serious recognition, the graf kids still weren’t willing to pay Banksy any dues. "He does art and art's NOT Graf," they’d tell you before shanking you for your shoes, coat and your New Era cap.

Well now he’s back from saving the Middle East from totally destroying itself, Banksy has taken it upon himself to try and heal this even bigger rift in modern society - that of the art-blokes and the graffiti kids. For his latest exhibition the anonymous one decided to take out a whole disused train tunnel near London Bridge and allow anybody-the-fuck to come up and do a little vandalism of their own, the only rules being - 1 & 2 (as standard) we don’t talk about it, 3 everybody has to use stencils (to avoid shitty tagging idiots ruining everything), and 4 no going over anybody else’s work (re: shitty tagging idiots ruining everything). That’s it, THAT’S the exhibition. This was going to be a revolution.

NN

“It’s like punk rock or something all over again,” a young hooded gentleman that referred to himself as Cuss’d told us. “That whole scene was about anybody picking up a guitar and banging something out and this is all about anybody picking up a spray-can and expressing themselves for a different kind of audience. Now the papers and magazines are all over it but it’s been happening for a minute now. I know ‘real’ graf kids are supposed to hate Banksy and don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly his biggest fan. But this sort of community thing is cool and it’s good that he’s trying to heal the rift between us and the art-kids. Now that the scene isn't so 'cool' anymore there’s less art-students and pretenders, less people just trying to sell everything out. This was open to anybody which to me is pretty much unheard of in the 'proper' art-world at large. Mainly due to the ‘get involved attitude’, a lot of writers have realised it isn’t necessarily selling out to make, for want of a better word, art and show it out in public.”

Nowadays there are exhibitions of street art all over London. The ‘pretentious graduate’ status quo of the art world is slowly breaking down as a new generation of YBAs emerge from the rooftops, streets and tube tunnels of London town into the galleries where they're inviting the rest of us back underground. The whole scene is like that old Puff Daddy video where they bum-rush the rich people dinner, take over the stage, rock out and get everybody ‘acting a fool up in here’ - except it doesn’t sound like fucking shit and is actually happening for real. It’s not easy to change the way art-blokes look at new art movements and it’s approximately ten billion times harder to change the way emerging art movements look at art-blokes, whatever his detractors want to say about him you can’t deny Banksy is out there attempting both.

Check out the official Cans website here