LONDON – CATCHING UP

Two years ago we did a throwaway blog entry on Banksy with a picture we found on the internet. I’m pretty sure we just google-imaged “UK grafiti.” Little did we know at the time, but our misspelled query would go on to ignite a firestorm of internet words. People (mostly British ones) were so outraged at seeing the face of a guy who spraypaints things places that they typed out angry sentences with words like “wanker” and “cunt” and left them in the comments. Eventually we realized the only way to cool down the situation was to put up a another picture of Banksy, and it worked. Everybody stopped caring. We thought the whole thing was over and done with, but then yesterday we passed a newsagent and saw that same inflammatory mug plastered across the front pages of god knows how many newspapers. We were like, Are they mad? Don’t they know how dangerous it is to show people a guy’s face who painted over a stencil of a rat holding an anarchy sign?