Stephen Koja - How to be a Surrealist with Philippa Perry TV - The UnXplained with William Shatner TV - Helena Bonham Carter TV - Graffiti Wars TV - My Name is Alan TV - Graffiti: From Tags to Riches TV - Style Wars 1983 - Beat This! A Hip Hop History 1984 - Richard Clay TV - The Banksy Job TV - Lenny Henry TV - Leonard Bernstein - Sensationalists: The Bad Girls & Boys of British Art TV - Simon Schama TV - Arena: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed TV - History's Greatest Mysteries TV - Play for Today TV - The Stormtrooper Scandal TV - What We Do in the Shadows TV - Fake or Fortune TV - My Kid Could Paint That 2007 - The Price of Everything 2018 - The Heiress and the Heist 2023 - Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty TV -
What united the Secessionists was the wish to educate the public. What they wanted was to elevate taste, elegance ... They tried to confront Austrian art. Stephan Koja, 19th Century Art – Belvedere Museum
Koloman Moser – and he was the multi-talent of the Secession. He was a designer of furniture, he was one of the greatest graphic designers of the time ... And he was a painter. ibid.
It’s a hundred years since the word surreal was first used, and now you hear it everywhere. For many people surreal just means bizarre. If you think of surrealist art at all, you’ll maybe think of those lonely landscapes littered with melting clocks, floating businessmen in bowler hats, a woman who looks like a violin, a lobster where a telephone should be, but surrealism didn’t start out like that. How to be a Surrealist with Philippa Perry, BBC 2022
I’m going to take you back to the beginnings of the surrealist movement and trace how their interest in the unconscious mind sparked an explosion of revolutionary ideas that transformed art and cinema and the world around us. ibid.
[Andre] Breton had his reasons for wanting to rearrange world order. Breton had been a medical student in the Fire World War … He set out his ideas in a sort of handbook, the Surrealist Manifesto. ibid.
Boston, Massachusetts, 18 March 1990: A baffling heist in which priceless paintings vanish into thin air … The largest property theft in American history, a museum heist in which priceless pieces of art were taken and to this day are still missing. The UnXplained with William Shatner s2e8: Outrageous Robberies, History 2022
I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art. Helena Bonham Carter
This man is described by some as one of the most important figures in counter-culture art. But the chances are you’ve never heard of him. Most of his work no longer exists. And was painted illegally in the first place. King Robbo is a wanted man and protects his identify for fear of arrest. Graffiti Wars, Channel 4 2011
He is one of the pioneers of graffiti writing. A movement that champions freedom of expression, and can be seen on street corners all over the world. ibid.
This is Banksy: the enigmatic street artist who also came from graffiti but has sold a popular and commercially successful version back to the world. ibid.
The different treatment of Banksy and Robby is symptomatic of a wider battle between street art and graffiti. ibid.
The most divisive art feud since Matisse and Picasso. ibid.
For the teenage Robbo from a tough London council estate bombing the trains was a way to raise a big middle finger to authority, as well as a opportunity to get his art seen by as many people as possible. An art gallery on wheels. ibid.
Robbo’s talent and ingenuity made him the undisputed graffiti king in London in the 80s and early 90s. ibid.
All of his work gradually vanished from the walls and trains of London except for this piece – painted in 1985 underneath the British Transport Police Headquarters ... The oldest piece of graffiti in London. ibid.
One night he met a young artist from Bristol called Banksy ... Banksy doesn’t play by graffiti’s rules and never did ... Banksy attacked Robbo’s final piece of work and turned the famous canal-side piece into this ... Banksy’s act was considered sacrilegious by many in the graffiti world. And it brought King Robbo out of retirement. ibid.
Graffiti writing has a strict code of conduct. ibid.
Robbo called into question Banksy’s artistic integrity. ibid.
Shoreditch: this is mecca for the world’s best street art and home to the galleries that bring it to a wider audience. ibid.
This gallery helped to establish Banksy as a selling artist. The fact that Robbo is now exhibiting here has not gone down well with the stenciller’s hardcore supporters. ibid.
But Robbo would never get his chance to retaliate against Banksy. Just days after this filming took place he was found unconscious in the street with life-threatening head injuries. And he’s been in a coma ever since. ibid.
Every day if I [Alan Streets] paint it’s like bliss. My Name is Alan, Sky Arts 2012
I made up my own action. ibid. Alan
I looked up to the sky and saw dragons and devils ... They just said I was erm schizophrenic. ibid.
I’ve got to do something to get a buzz ... It’s like being on LSD but like all the time. ibid.
A lot of abstract art is a big con. ibid.
Stroke of genius puts him on top. ibid. New York Daily News 29th July 2005
Since Graffiti first started appearing on the streets of the UK almost thirty years ago it’s come a long long way. Graffiti: From Tags to Riches, Sky Arts 2013
Banksy: whose work now sells for hundreds of thousands of pounds. ibid.
Authorities divided on whether street art should be sanctioned. ibid.
Sickboy is keen to distance himself from the hype. ibid.
Like Sickboy, Cyclops is one of the new wave of artists emerging in the wake of Banksy. ibid.
New York City 1982: They call themselves writers because that’s what they do: they write their names among other things everywhere. Names they’ve been given or have chosen themselves. Most of all they write in and on subway trains which carry their names from one end of the city to the other. It’s called bombing … Graffiti writing in New York is a vocation … to some it’s art. Style Wars, 1983
In the 1970s New York graffiti, rapping and breaking became the prime expression of a new young people’s subculture called Hip Hop. Graffiti is the written word. ibid.
To the streets where artists take a chance and the Bronx where young men on the go paint trains and walls like Picasso. Beat This! A Hip Hop History, DJ, 1984
Graffiti can be many things: the ephemeral lasts: from the scandalous scrawlings of Rome’s citizens to radical graffiti of revolutionary Parisian, it can be scratched, written, even painted. But what does it mean? For tens of thousands of years humans have been leaving their marks on walls. Richard Clay, A Brief History of Graffiti, BBC 2017
These are probably the most moving of the marks I’ve seen: marks left by Soviet soldiers who survived the battle for the Reichstag. ibid.
The clues might lie deep in our past. ibid.
This urge to mark walls around seems to be part of what makes us human. ibid.
Graffiti can reveal power struggles between communities. ibid.
This new graffiti that hit the urban sprawl of 60s and 70s America created a moral panic. ibid.
The best graffiti is art. Challenging art. ibid.
It’s all legal … I promise you that … We’re gonna go and acquire one of Banksy’s works [The Drinker] and we’re gonna hold it to ransom. The Banksy Job, AK47’s commentary, Sky Arts 2020
I didn’t realise then I was opening a fucking Pandora’s box. ibid.
I’m AK47, leader and front man of Art Kieda – we’re an art terrorist organisation. ibid.
I’m an artist. I live in AK47 world. My art is not to be bought or sold. I don’t do it for the money … I just do it to cause mayhem. ibid.
Arto-Politikal-Humourism: it’s artistic, it’s political and we’re taking the piss. ibid.
I’m conceptual: the first time I called myself an artist was when I stole a Banksy piece. ibid.
I kidnapped Tracey Emin off of the wall of the Hackney Empire. They wasn’t fucking happy at all. Especially when we sent it back and it didn’t work. ibid.
‘He went to the police. The piece became legally his and he put it in his garden. I understand Banksy had a bit of a sense of humour failure about this, which I slightly sympathise with.’ ibid. dealer
Banksy statue stolen from garden: The owner claims the statue is worth up to £250,000. ibid. Hackney Bugle mock front page
‘I don’t know whether Banksy had it stolen back.’ ibid. dealer
I am restoring this lost work of art, and without me, this piece will never be seen again. ibid.
You have Mark I cone with Mark II drinker.’ ibid. dealer
We’re going to return it to its original spot. ibid. AK47 to gang
‘From the Thinker to the Drinker to the Stinker.’ ibid. dealer, AK47 adds toilet seat to the Drinker
Predictably, the mainstream turned its nose up at Caribbean art. Lenny Henry’s Caribbean Culture I, BBC 2022
Any great art work ... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. Leonard Bernstein