Following on nicely from the Banksy street piece held by Andipa mentioned in the post below, a picture of it features on the cover of an absolutely brilliant new retrospective book on the worldwide culture of street art. Entitled “Untitled – Street Art in The Counter Culture” (hence the clever title of this post 😉
Also doubly cool as it features my picture of that Banksy piece in question on the front cover…..
I was actually there the night the guy who owned the door was contemplating selling the it on Ebay, he reckoned he would fetch around £850 for it and seemed more than happy with that…..I don’t officially know if it ever made it to Ebay…but it definitely ended up in the hands of Andipa.
The book has been curated and published by Gary Shove, a friend I met originally via the Banksy forum and then at a couple of shows. He was clearly extremely passionate about putting a no bullshit book out there, filled with artists he was passionate about ….and rather rarely for a book on the movement he has done a superb job of writing it from a real fans perspective, rather than someone publishing a book to jump on the street art bandwagon.
The book is never afraid to say fuck and bugger..and I think that’s what I admire it for most greatly…a breath of fresh air rather than trying to be high brow and use long words….which quite frankly I would struggle to keep up with. It also does a good job of never trying to intellectualise the whole thing, which many other books have done before it.
Excerpts from the website http://www.untitledstreetart.co.uk/index.html
“Not to be filed under history, photography, design or non-fiction, as it contains outright lies and outrageous subjective opinion, this book is definitely about street art. It is also about now. Fungus grows on your collected wild-style pioneers. Vile passions rage between old schools and new. Shit flies out from under the hammer at auction houses and property developers fund street art shows to liberal press fanfare. Oh, and Banksy hits the West Bank. Is anyone taking this stuff seriously? Should it be taken seriously? Is it all just an immense daisy chain of poker faces, irony and mind games?”
From Brooklyn to Bethlehem, Brick Lane to Barcelona this book shows just why street art is destined to become the first new major art movement of the 21st Century.
Do the guy a favour and help him recover all his costs and ,make this book the hit it deserves to be…it’s worth every penny for the limited edition version (750 copies only) which features a hardback cover, gloss laminated and a eclectic mix CD inserted into the back…..superb!