Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Banksy (born 1974) is neither the messiah you’ve been waiting for nor the antichrist some denounce. He is the perfect symptom of an era that confuses the ease of a message with the depth of thought, media buzz with artistic relevance. From the streets of Bristol to the walls of Gaza, his works taunt us with an irony so obvious it becomes almost unbearable. And yet, I cannot help but see in them the exact reflection of our contemporary zeitgeist, a mirror held up to a society oscillating constantly between rebellion and conformity, between the desire for subversion and submission to the market.
Let’s start by dissecting this artist’s obsession with subverting symbols of power, a signature of his work since the 1990s. His mischievous rats that invade urban spaces evoke Michel Foucault’s conception of power—diffuse, omnipresent, and infiltrating every corner of society. When Banksy paints rodents equipped with cameras or surveillance devices, he doesn’t just create striking images; he materializes Bentham’s panopticon theory, reinterpreted by Foucault, where power is wielded through the mere possibility of observation. Surveillance thus becomes the main character of a society that watches itself through the distorting prism of screens and lenses.
But where Foucault theorized the complexity of social control mechanisms with surgical finesse, Banksy delivers pre-digested metaphors, shock images that hit hard but sometimes miss the mark. Take his “Girl with Balloon”, auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2018 for €1.4 million before partially self-destructing. The act is brilliant in concept—a scathing critique of the art market—but so calculated it becomes just another marketing ploy. This performance eerily recalls Guy Debord’s theory of the society of the spectacle, where even dissent becomes a commodity. The shredded artwork was resold for €18.5 million in 2021, proving the system’s infinite capacity to absorb what claims to destroy it.
This fundamental ambivalence runs through Banksy’s work like a bloody red thread. His interventions in Palestine, particularly on the separation wall, achieve a deeper dimension that transcends mere provocation. His trompe-l’œil pieces, seemingly opening concrete to reveal paradisiacal landscapes, align with a philosophical tradition dating back to Plato’s cave. The artist literally shows us how to break through illusions, to see beyond the walls we build. These works transcend witty remarks to become acts of resistance questioning the very nature of our physical and mental boundaries.
There’s a touch of Walter Benjamin in this approach to art as a political tool. Just as Benjamin saw in technical reproduction a potential for democratizing art, Banksy uses the inherent reproducibility of stencils to spread his message. Yet unlike Benjamin, who foresaw the end of an artwork’s aura, Banksy paradoxically creates a new form of aura—that of the ephemeral and the anonymous. His works are all the more valuable because they can disappear at any moment, erased by authorities or “saved” by unscrupulous collectors willing to carve out entire walls.
His technique itself, the stencil, warrants attention. Simple, effective, infinitely reproducible, it enables rapid dissemination and immediate recognition. But this technical simplicity hides a conceptual complexity echoing Jacques Rancière’s reflections on the “distribution of the sensible”. By choosing the street as his gallery, Banksy redefines the spaces where art can and should appear. He disrupts the traditional hierarchy of exhibition venues, creating what Rancière might call a new “distribution of the visible”.
This tension between visibility and invisibility brings us to the core of the second fundamental aspect of his work: his critique of consumer capitalism. His subversions of brands and parodies of advertisements align with Jean Baudrillard’s analyses of hyperreality. When Banksy transforms Disney’s logo into a nightmare image or places a giant Ronald McDonald next to a starving child, he doesn’t just create striking contrasts; he exposes what Baudrillard called the “simulacrum”—a media-constructed reality replacing the real.
His 2015 installation “Dismaland” pushes this logic to absurdity. This “family theme park unsuitable for children”, as he described it, is a masterful deconstruction of leisure societies. By turning symbols of prefab happiness into dystopian nightmares, Banksy aligns with Herbert Marcuse’s analyses of the one-dimensional man, trapped in a society that creates artificial needs to better control him. Depressed employees wearing Mickey ears, Cinderella’s castle turned into apocalyptic ruins, remote-controlled boats packed with migrants—each element critiques what Marcuse called “repressive desublimation”, the system’s ability to neutralize dissent by turning it into entertainment.
Yet here lies the problem: by playing with the codes of the consumer society, Banksy has himself become a product. His works fetch astronomical sums in galleries, even as they denounce this very system. This contradiction mirrors Theodor Adorno’s critique of the culture industry: even the most radical protest ends up being co-opted by the system it condemns. The rebellious rat stencils end up on mass-produced T-shirts, images of revolt become decorative posters in teenagers’ bedrooms.
Banksy’s anonymity, far from being merely a marketing ploy as some claim, could be read as an attempt to resist this co-optation. By refusing to physically embody the figure of the artist, he echoes Roland Barthes’s theories on the death of the author. The work exists independently of its creator, belonging to those who view it, interpret it, and photograph it with their smartphones before it’s erased or stolen. This deliberate erasure of the artist behind the work creates an interpretive freedom reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “open work”.
His work on the Gaza wall perfectly illustrates this political dimension of his art. By painting children who seem to break through the wall or rise above it with balloons, Banksy doesn’t merely create poetic images. He materializes what Jacques Rancière calls “dissensus”—the ability of art to make the invisible visible, to amplify silenced voices. These interventions transform the separation wall, a symbol of oppression, into a canvas for expressions of freedom and hope.
His focus on surveillance and social control also deserves attention. His numerous depictions of security cameras, often accompanied by rats mocking or sabotaging them, resonate with Gilles Deleuze’s analyses of “control societies”. These societies, succeeding Foucault’s disciplinary ones, operate not through confinement but through continuous control and instant communication. Banksy’s works on this theme are not mere denunciations; they propose tactics of resistance, ways to subvert surveillance through humor and derision.
His complex relationship with the art market reveals another dimension of his work. By organizing impromptu sales of his pieces for a few dollars in Central Park and creating certificates of authenticity that are artworks themselves, Banksy plays with the mechanisms of value creation in the art world. He aligns here with Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses of cultural and symbolic capital. Who determines the value of an artwork? How is this value constructed and legitimized?
His recurring use of childhood imagery—girls with balloons, children searched by policemen, young protesters throwing bouquets—also deserves scrutiny. It aligns with a tradition of political art using innocence as a critical weapon, recalling Lewis Hine’s early 20th-century photography on child labor. But while Hine sought to document social realities, Banksy creates allegories that play on emotions in ways that can feel overly calculated.
The question of reproducibility in his work also demands closer analysis. By choosing stencils as his primary technique, Banksy follows a tradition dating back to the posters of May 1968 and Blek le Rat’s work. Yet he pushes this logic further by consciously playing with the reproduction and diffusion mechanisms of the digital era. His works are designed to be photographed, shared on social media, turned into memes. This viral diffusion strategy echoes Marshall McLuhan’s analyses of media as extensions of man.
We are thus faced with an artist who uses the apparent simplicity of his images to convey complex messages about our times. His rats, children, and kissing policemen are mirrors held up to a society that often prefers not to see its reflection. But by striving to be too accessible, by seeking immediate impact, Banksy risks falling into the very trap he denounces—a society privileging visual impact over deep reflection.
And therein lies Banksy’s paradox: he is both the most scathing critic of our society of spectacle and one of its most brilliant representatives. His works are instantly recognizable, perfectly tailored to the social media age, yet they claim to denounce this same culture of image. He creates images that alter our perception of the world while remaining trapped within the very modes of dissemination they critique.
Banksy may be less the subversive genius some perceive and more an extraordinary seismograph of our time. His works, with their simple messages and effective executions, perfectly reflect a society oscillating between the desire for revolt and submission to spectacle. He has become, despite himself—or perhaps intentionally—the artist who shows us how rebellion itself can become merchandise. And perhaps that is his greatest achievement: making us aware of this contradiction, even if he himself cannot escape its traps. In a world where authenticity has become the most precious counterfeit, Banksy remains the ultimate illusionist, showing us the strings of manipulation even as he masterfully pulls them himself.
