You Don’t Seem Like A Public Menace To Me

You’re just a street artist!

A week after a hoax news story floated around claiming well-known, but elusive, street artist Banksy had been arrested and his identity revealed, a couple friends and I took a trip to Bristol and, among other things, saw some of the city’s famous street art.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was familiar with murals, like our Penn State mural, and graffiti, like the words and names one sees sprayed indiscriminantly under bridges and in alleyways, but street art was mostly new for me. Here are some examples of street art, both large and small, commercial and purely artistic, of unknown degrees of legality:

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I enjoyed seeing a lot of the art. Many of the works were very well done, and I was by the quality of some of them. Many had political or social undertones, but some were purely for enjoyment. There was still plenty of what I had previously considered graffiti, but I found I really liked the more mural-like works. Also, the street art around Stokes Croft (a street in Bristol) so starkly contrasts the traditional English architecture of the old city centre to the south. In the end, I’m glad I went and expanded my knowledge of street art.

What are your thoughts on street art? Would you mind if someone sprayed/painted works like these around State College? Or would you consider it vandalism? (Even in Bristol, street art is still controversial.)


Location: Bristol, UK

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One thought on “You Don’t Seem Like A Public Menace To Me”

  1. BRIANNA LYNN WINTER

    These street painting are really good! I don’t think I would mind seeing them up in cities around the U.S but I guess maybe the reason they are such a big deal is the underlying messages behind each of them. It’s just so different from what I would consider to be graffiti, I don’t think I would consider them to be vandalism.

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