Banksy, British humor and acid ironic graffiti. Sense, meaning and inverted ready-mades in urban art

Abstract

On the periphery of the intellectual debate about the redefinition of visual art, street art is progressively acquiring a clearer status as an artistic manifestation with intrinsic value led by a group of artists who, under anonymity, are capable of producing art on the walls of the city itself, projecting it in the public space and outside the museum circuits. This research analyses the theoretical foundations of meaning in graffiti and street art and considers, as a starting hypothesis, the role of architecture and the city as elements of an inverted ready-made that street artists ultimately use not only as a material support but as an instrument of meaning unequivocally intentionally integrated into their work. The conclusions will place the reader and the citizen in a key position to understand Banksy's work as a paradigmatic example of this new expressive media in which the graphic work dialogues and integrates within a given physical context defined by the material limits that configure public space. This new more sophisticated understanding of street art places this kind of artistic production executed by a critical minority and received by a social majority at the vortex of contemporary cultural problematic, resignifying the city as a container as well as an artistic content embodying the graffitied plastic creation and the urban architectural context in a single signifier.