July 15, 2008 8:23

Streetsy

A London newspaper reported over the weekend that it may have uncovered the real identity of Banksy, the Robin Hood of British street art. I'll believe it when I see their guy do something like this....

One Nation Under CCTV, Banksy, 2008/All Photos: LACAYO

What you see up there is a massive Banksy that he whipped off last April just around the corner from my hotel, a protest against the CCTV street surveillance video cameras that are everywhere in the U.K.

Not a Banksy, 2008

Though you can't see it in the picture, one of those cameras is located just to the right of the wall space where Banksy went to work. The image is so tall that British newspapers assume it required him to build a scaffold — directly under the nose, or at least to one side, of the CCTV lens.

London is having a sort of street art apotheosis-moment this summer. In May Tate Modern temporarily gave over its long Thames-side wall to six big images by street artists or collectives from outside the UK, including Faile from New York.

Another is by Blu, the Bologna-based artist whose incredible wall drawing animation I linked to last month.

The Brazilian artist Nunca satirized the whole project of bringing street art into a British museum with the figure of a giant sipping a cup of tea while stepping on a severed hand — the artist's?

The Sao Paolo-based twin brothers Os Gemeos also took a swipe at CCTV with a giant yellow nude holding a bunch of captured surveillance cameras.

The feet were the best part. They reminded me of those clunky flat feet you see at the bottom of early Renaissance paintings, the kind that Picasso borrowed in his neo-classical phase.

These however won't last five hundred years. They all come down on August 25.