"Graffiti." "Is it art?" "Some people say it´ s art." "Some people say it´s pure vandalism." "What´s your view on this?" "Some people think it´s ugly... some people think it´s bringing crime into the area... some people think it´s nice." "You make some smile and they go to work." "When you leave something in the street, you know that the day after, thousands and thousands of people would see your work." "It´s in your face." "You wake up in the morning and you see it and its just like, there, straight away for the audience." "It´s like a direct dialog with the people." "And it´s in a very democratic way." "You can show your work in a public space so you don´t have the problem to show it in the galleries." "I just got bored waiting for exhibitions so I just started to do stuff in the streets." "It is one of the reasons why we are painting on the streets." "Because if you wanna go and see art, you go to an art gallery, you go to a museum." "People do large scale painting on canvases;" "it´s just the same thing but, you know, the canvas is already there on the streets." "I think it´s a definite different feel to it." "Because you´ve got a canvas, it has got a border." "It´s a rectangle, it´s a square." "Whereas if you are on a wall, normally the wall extends further and there is different things to think about." "My point is to work with the surface, to work with colors, to work with pictures." "I didn´t realize there were so many other people doing this similar stuff." "I didn´t realize that there is a street art world." "I met a lot of really nice people," "I´ve traveled... and it´s sort of almost like a little family group really." "Everybody sort of knows everybody." "We travel a lot." "We do a lot of work around we are going to L.A. for 10 days." "First next month." "Then I will spend a month and a half in the United States." "Most of us...we are nomads." "We have been traveling around a lot." "PARIS" "This is my first graffiti, 1981." "It was very primitive." "I have to say that in Paris, that time in 1981, it was no graffities at all, except political graffities." "The first time I made graffiti, it was some rats, small rats, you know, like a shadow running along the sidewalk of the city." "This is the first rat, maybe in 1981-82." "I wanted to invade Paris with my images." "The first time I was introduced to graffiti art was in New York City in 1971." "So a long time ago." "The art started in the end of the 70´s with KIKAY?" ", people like that." "They are very, very important." "Because they introduced this art to the art market." "I am very influenced by the pop art, more than the graffiti art." "Stencil is my style." "Black and white." "And I think it is important to work in black and white also." "Because the life is full of colors and... if you live in a city, everything is in color." "So this is my work." "And this guy added the bat." "And I really liked it." "It was like of conversation with someone." "I really like that, you know." "When I have an answer to my images." "So I went outside to make my graffities, because I wanted to have a connection with people." "I wanted to meet people, to get accepted by people, more than to get famous or to get money with my art." "We are going to Belleville." "I went to court in 1990 for painting a wall in Paris so I stopped." "And now I paste posters." "But I remember in the early 80´s at that time, before the police didn´t care at all." "They stopped the car, they jumped off the car, they asked "Is it political?"" ""No, no." "It´s not political at all." "This is art."" ""So, OK, keep on with your work." "It is beautiful man."" "I have more a social message, than a political message." "She sad your image is very sad." "It would be beautiful to add something funny." "And I tried to explain to her that around here there is a lot of homeless people living in the sleeping bag like that and that we have to do something for them." "It is a reflection of our society and how our society lives." "MADRID" "There are good vibes in the air." "I mean here and in Madrid in general lately." "It´s good." "There is lots of people doing things." "In Madrid, there is enough space to paint." "We are not going to get in trouble, because they are going to paint over you or things like that." "I think that people who own it, I think they like it." "So they quite often clean it for me." "So it´s kind of sweet." "We have permission to paint the whole road, because this is where the studio is." "And every time somebody comes from around..." "This is our friend Thorsane?" "from Barcelona, or Pelukas or graff writers from Madrid." "We just invite people to paint and have a beer or something." "Then we go to the studio." "This is made by Lui." "Lui, or 3TTMAN is his artist name." "We were looking for a space to work, and then we saw that this was abandoned." "It´s been abandoned for a long, long time." "This is Luises place." "It was destroyed when we arrived." "And we are building everything ourselves." "This is my place." "This is the kitchen." "I don´t have a graffiti background." "I never painted a train." "I don´t know how to do a drawing with a spray can." "I´m just a painter, and I am interested in doing the street work." "Usually when you work with somebody else, it´s usually freestyle or spontaneous and improvised." "I think there is no problem." "They don´t really know what to do." "Because we are painting on top of billboards." "It´s not painting somebody elses property." "The fact that it´s illegal, painting in the street" " I think it is really important." "It is an important element of the act." "The sketchbooks are kind of like...what I like the most of doing." "I always have like 3 or 4 at the same time." "I never really thought about myself as an ilustrator." "Even though what I do is basically ilustration." "I like to be on the street, painting, to hear all the reactions from the people, who are passing through." "So it´s kind of a social art." "The important thing for me is that the people who stop there...and it´s like a silence." "In the middle of the city." "Like an open space to the own reflection." "LONDON" "What exactly is art?" "Is it a brick, is it a dirty napkin, is it an oil painting?" "You know, there are so many questions about things." "And it´s the same as on the streets." "Like who has put that over." "Who´s that?" "You know." "Who is doing these little things?" "What´s that thing on the bus stop there?" "Well in a way it´s just the same as the other street artists, really." "I mean, ...just using the street as a gallery." "They are signatures in themselves, they are a tag in themselves." "It doesn´t need people to say...this is the potato guy." "To throw them at the top of bus shelters, has a lot to do with people traveling to and from ...and the monotony as well." "So I started just painting potatos with circles on them." "And then progressed to make them as noticable as possible." "But obviously they are just a sort of a tag." "The idea of making objects that have their own natural lifespan, then they are gone." "This always attracted me." "A lot of street art is very graphic based." "I just think that more abstract sculptures was something that wasn´t really covered." "So my work sort of evolved in that way." "There was something about suspect devices, and ..don´t leave things unattended." "And the idea that a sculpture is a sort of danger." "Art can be serious." "It has got a very serious side to it and I´ve got to motivate myself to do it." "I´m not a dare person." "It was a lot of speculation." "People were thinking that there were devices to record the busses, ...sort of little space aliens." "We are writing the word EXCITING around the outside of 333 (club)." "I started about 3 years ago." "And my original intention was to write my name across 4 shutters." "And I painted two Es´ underneath a nightclub, which I thought it was quite funny." "And I was looking at the photograph of the shutters and I was just like..." "You know what." "If I write my name, it´s going to ruin it." "My name is quite boring, the graffiti is quite boring..." "Just by making it more abstract, by not signing my name and just random letters for no reason." "It just became more interesting." "You know, street art is a lot more user friendly." "The general public like it." "Or, you know, an essential of them like it." "Whereas graffiti is "graffiti for the sake of graffiti"." "And, you know, graffiti writers don´t care what other people think." "You know, you are walking down the road and one day, bang, something new appeared." "So I like that surprise element." "I think that´s fun." "And you cheer people up." "Through doing graffiti it got me through the whole art college and got me interested in art." "I didn´t really know much about art." "But then I´ve got more into painting, and got more into sculpture," "I´ve got into printmaking ...so it sort of, you know, made me aware of all these other things." "We slightly become like educated vandals." "On the painting side, I work with a number of mediums." "So it could be from oil to aerosol to household paint." "But mainly I specialize in oil, but then on the street side it´s whatever I can get my hands hold of." "I think today we are gonna put up something like that." "Painting cyclops..." "He was painting the skulls, I was doing the teeth." "We just jumped and moved together." "And it´s that whole thing of colaboration." "You know, it´s working..." "And usually in the studio you are on your own." "On the streets it´s more spontaneous." "You are there, and you have a limited amount of time to paint it." "So the excitement is there, the adventure is there." "You never know how it´s gonna go." "And the audience is there, straight away." "As a scene goes as a whole among them...it´s getting bigger." "People are getting over bigger." "People are being more surprising, people are being more cheeky, people are being more imaginative." "So in general I think it´s a good scene." "And it´s always inspiring to me." "ART and COMMERCE" "I think it´s more about being able to show the work in a good environment." "Whether it´s something more suited to a dingy decansian basement or something that suited to momental." "In the last 10 years, I´ve been putting up a lot of stuff on the streets and that seems like it´s nice to be able to put stuff up that´s gonna last for...you know, slightly longer." "If you do a really, really nice piece, ...you know sometimes, and it gets destroyed within days, it´s a real shame." "The gallery and the streets coexist." "I don´t think they are mutually exclusive." "And I think the gallery offers an opportunity to artists to explore different mediums, different techniques, different finishes, that they can´t necessarily explore when they are working in the street." "I believe that galleries and museums and this kind of places compliments the works of people who paint on the streets." "As an artist that puts his work on the street you want it to last as long as it possibly can." "You want it to be there indefinitely..forever." "Realistically." "By putting it on the street, thats not going to be the case." "I like the idea to have the ephemeral part of my work hoping that it´s gonna stay for a long time." "I think the whole nature of all of this is just another form of conflict." "There is a conflict of people who want to turn it into a commodity." "There is a conflict of people who want to take things that are supposed to be free." "Peeling it of the walls, putting them on a canvas and put a price tag on them." "What we do at the gallery here is that we bring people down." "They wouldn´t necessary be paying attention to the work in the street." "And then we say, this artist is a street artist or a graffiti artist, that uses the public space to display their work." "Well most of the artists that actually got in here are friends of mine I work with on the street." "So it´s not people that go like, "Hm, they would be commercially viable."" "It´s more people like, "I like their stuff, and also I like their attitude."" "And as an artist you wanna live and survive as an artist." "And that´s the greatest thing as an artist is to be able to fund yourself to live, and continue to produce work." "You know, it´s been a dream of mine to sell my own stuff and make a living doing that." "So, you know, I have fantastic opportunities." "And it´s great." "But, you know, I kinda think we present ourselves as street artists and to do that, you have to have a presence on the street." "I don´t think street art is going to ever gain the level of credibility and seriousness which makes for long term art market prices." "It´s doubtful that you gonna end up with a BANKSY retrospective at the TATE." "I think there is a long history of this art in the art world." "And hopefully what the show helps to do is highlight the big crossover between other genres, other moments in art history and other arts in art history that have taken inspiration from the street and from ephemeral art." "It is really important that the museums get involved at this point and that they involve the people that have been doing it for a long time and know what they are doing." "And they start representing these shows to the wider audience, to a wider public." "What I think is great about this show is, that it gives these artists and this art, gives them the recognition which is maybe not been afforded before." "It´s good that this kind of art is now recognized." "Obviously, street art is increasing a lot." "And the fact that TATE is inviting us." "For my part it´s good, as long as you still work in the street." "I think one thing, thats been really nice as well is with this whole proces." "That the public has been able to see the work going up." "Actually see something being made in front of you." "It´s almost like a magic trick done in reverse, or something." "I think that this kind of art doesn´t need institutions to get it happen." "You have a whole city to work with." "Once you do take street art off the streets it just becomes art." "What I find a bit such of ridiculous about street art, especially when you see what kind of BANKSY and some of those other characters are doing... the content of their messages is so such of obvious." "They are making money out of a pose." "And the pose is rebelion." "But that was always the first thing that you could sell back to rebels." "You know." "That´s the joke." "Once you´ve got an art market that´s decided that it can sell something to people, that it´s got interest from collectors, it´s going to do as much as it possibly can to pump that up." " This is BANKSY." "Behind me." "The best way to describe the market is ... it´s young, it´s new, it´s exciting." "I think BANKSY really kickstarted the markets." "First he flew the highprofiled media attention he´s given to open art." "And secondly to the prices that he has achieved at auction and in the galleries." "The bottom talk is wit, because you´ve got this really posh set of people, you´ve got a really posh auction, really posh auction house and they are selling stuff that has like copers giving you the finger" "and guerrillas with bazukas." "You have bought in to the brand status of BANKSY." "Or any of these other kind of up and coming artists." "That´s just the same thing as any kind of other branded life style statement to do with luxury goods." "I think that the most important factor about that recent auction is that the focus shifted from just being about BANKSY and it started to bring in to other artists that had been doing it as long or longer, questionably." "And people started to realize that it wasn´t just about one artist, it´s actually about a genre, about a scene of artists." "Now it´s like people that are stoping you, "You are Banksy?" "!"" "You know." "And it´s just like, "You are not Banksy, are you?"" "And it´s almost like they´ve accepted it a lot more, because of the thing that makes the world go around money." "Banksy is not involved in this show." "This is an independent exhibition drawn from the secondary market." "No doubt, that the street side is a very, very important part of his output." "And that´s obviously what gets the press attention." "And that´s what gets the "everyday person in the streets" attention as well, because they walk past that everyday." "Whereas they wouldn´t neccesary be walking past a nice bridge fine art gallery." "And thats what so wonderful about his work." "About the accessibility of his work." "But lets not forget again that there has always been a commercial side to Banksy and his contemporaries where they have been selling works." "And that whole philosophy is very different to their philosophy when they are executing work on the street." "It´s always nicer to work closely with the artist." "And of course in this case, neither we do represent him nor are we so much in touch with him, because nobody really knows who he is." "Everybody is buying." "That´s the phenomena." "I think that we are seeing the commercial side." "Everybody is buying." "Secondary market has always the right on itself." "You know, Picasso, Van Gogh sold their art or exchanged their art to live for food, for drink." "So it´s just a modern day rendition of that." "It´s interesting that this sort of biotopic has become sort the focus of the work, thats going into the street." "The question was never "Oh this is vandalism"." "It´s like, Banksy is just a new piece on the side of this persons wall." "He has given him a 300.000 pound piece of work." "That´s the real hype." "The fact that people are spending lots of money on this stuff." "Because that has really to do with people saying," ""Well, my goodness, 200.000 pound for that?"" "Well, that was the same story with modern art all along." "It´s always people complaining that you can´t spend that kind of money on a teapot, or a urinal or a shark in a tank." "Again, lets ask ourselves the question" ""Are we just seeing history repeat itself?"" "With a new movement coming along, and quite a lot of misunderstanding." "And so therefore a lot of questioning." "In my opinion, the graffiti movement is the most important movement of the 20th century." "There is no city in the world without graffiti." "What it´s really about is that contemporary art nowadays is always seeking to address itself to the biggest audience." "That´s how it gets recognition and that´s how it gets its reputation." "So no, I don´t think it´s a fart." "This urban art is a real art." "It´s a true art, it´s a living art." "Very living." "It´s not dead at all." "It´s not like in museums, where you can see paintings completely dead."