Graffiti is supposed to be ephemeral. If you want your art seen by thousands of commuters tomorrow, the price you pay is that it might be gone by the day after. So it's difficult to believe that Banksy, down in his secret underground lair full of anarchist rats, is too upset that yet another one of his urban works has been painted over - he's probably pleased that it survived so long.
What's more worrying is Transport for London's response to concerns over their erasure of Banksy's famous Pulp Fiction-inspired mural on Old Street. When some workmen in Bristol accidentally got rid of one of the artist's early "throw-ups" in March, the council were quick to admit that a mistake had been made and their normal policy was to preserve his work. London Transport, by contrast, insisted that the Old Street piece had been deliberately removed because graffiti brings with it a "general atmosphere of neglect and social decay, which in turn encourages crime".
The spokesman was presumably referring here to the "Broken Windows theory", first popularised by a 1982 article in the Atlantic Monthly by criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson. The idea is that minor signs of disorder, like graffiti, litter and broken windows, can give the dangerous impression that law has broken down in the neighbourhood; crime, so it's claimed, follows. Many major American cities have rebuilt their policing around the theory. But there are two reason why we should be surprised to see it in this context.
Firstly, if the Broken Windows theory has been adopted as official GLA doctrine, then we deserve an explicit justification for that move. After all, the theory is still very controversial, as you can see from this recent blog exchange between best-selling pop-sociologists Malcom Gladwell and Stephen J. Dubner.
Second, using Broken Windows to justify the removal of a Banksy mural is utterly self-contradictory. The theory is a sort of synecdoche, where smashed glass represents not just a single act of vandalism but chaos waiting to break out. So Transport for London believe, correctly, that a small crime can have a big meaning. But if Jules and Vincent with their bananas do indeed have a larger meaning, then plainly it's very little to do with lawlessness, and far more to do with the explosion of youthful creativity and experimental culture that east London has enjoyed over the last 15 years. Irrespective of the work's artistic merit, the "general atmosphere" it creates is one of vibrancy and possibility, not of "decay" or "neglect". It's more like a sculpture in a park than a broken window.
Transport for London had the legal right to destroy Banksy's mural - they're actually obliged to justify themselves. But they should come up with something better than a perverse interpretation of an unproven theory.
