"Culture Jamming"- Banksy

Banksy is a culture jamming graffiti artist well known for his street art. His identity remains to be unknown as most of ways he went about resisting mainstream and popular culture is illegal. In reading and researching some of the work he has done, I found myself intrigue especially with two of his art work that I found mainly because of the way he uses them to expose mainstream and in turn using it against them; making them look bad.









He uses the picture above (the broken window theory) to explain how mainstream culture has persuade us to believe that wherever graffiti and vandalism is present, more crime and violence is likely to occur because people think they can get away with it. However, Banksy is now laughing at them because guess what, more and more people are started to like his art, and is traveling all over to see them. People started writing to him and telling him to stop putting his work in their neighborhood, because it is getting too much attention from people and the media and they want to move into the neighborhood. This is a clear example of taking mainstream culture and throwing it back into their face.

















Banksy also compared a rats to culture jamming. Hi theory is that rats starts off small, in one place, and at the bottom. However, before you know it, they are everywhere. Culture jamming is the same if you think about it. First, you have something that starts off in one place, sometimes small with not so many people involve. However, before you know it, its everywhere.

These are only two examples of culture jamming, but am sure it is viewed in many other ways.