There’s a tough war going on, in the streets of London: there’re no rules and nothing is sacred. Luckily it’s an art war and the two bloodthirsty opponents are world famous graffitist Bansky and another legend of street art: King Robbo.
The feud started in 2009 when King Robbo – among the pioneers of old school graffiti in London and widely recognised as one of the greats of both the UK and the international scene – decided it was time to show Bansky he was not the ruler of London’s walls. Actually King Robbo had retired from the scene, but decided to come back to give Bansky a lesson, as he explained: “[Bansky] broke a graff code of conduct and for a lawless community we have a lot of laws, so I had to come back. What people don’t realise is that he’d already gone over loads of my stuff before and I hadn’t bothered retaliating but this time it was just so deliberate, so cowardly. If you’ve got the hump about something, you send a message and discuss it like gentlemen, you don’t wipe out a piece of graffiti history. But that’s what he does, never expresses his own opinion, he puts something out and lets people fool themselves, he’s smart in that respect“.
The two started altering each other’s works, adding writings of drawings, but King Robbo is not so sure to be willing to come back in the scene: “I have doubts about doing it full time. It has been watered down, there’s a certain glamour around it which makes it sexy to be involved in graff. There’s blogs and magazines that have done very well to publicise it but I feel like a lot of them have their own agenda, they’ve seen a business aspect and that there’s money to be made from graffiti. Young writers can edit and upload their photos onto the Internet and get an immediate response but they’re not out there living it 24/7. Obviously there’s still great people like TOX who do it because they just love being vandals and I love the rooftop artists like Burning Candy and Panik who still have that rebellion, they’ve gone up higher to avoid getting buffed. To me they risk getting arrested to brighten up my eye-line and get their art seen, that mentality is real graffiti“.
So, it’s an artistic war and no one is going to be hurt… but it’s a war and even if no violence is involved, there’s a considerable amount of resentment in both opponents. Whose side are you on?
