insomnolent ramblings

2007 looks like it's set to be a bad year for guerilla artists. what with hackney council's tough new wall cleaning program starting to have an effect and the anti urban art stance of network rail being made abundantly clear, london appears anxious to shake off it's image as europe's largest gallery of seemingly subversive stencil work.

those grey suited men of power made infamous by half baked orwellian rantings of conspiracy theorists must be rubbing their hands together with glee as our pliant population endeavours to increase the rate of environmental homogenisation. their persistence in attempting to condition us into calmly settling into the banal, television numbed, preplanned and tedious existence of the "man in the street" is paying off.

or maybe i'm reading too much into things, maybe charlie brooker's right... maybe this spate of removing high profile pieces of graffiti is integral to the inception of interesting urban art installations. perhaps without this purging process the creativity of society's spray paint wielding artisans would atrophy irreparably leaving them unable to do anything but smash all the glass out of public phone boxes and scrawl their postcodes onto bus shelters.

whichever way i look at it, the sudden removal of the banksy round the corner from my office is an affront to me on a personal level. what possible justification is there for this mural's extirpation?