Over the past couple of years, the hyper-ascension of everyone’s favorite street artist has led to all kinds of phenomena, including the mainstreaming of the artform and, yes, its commodification.

In the case of Banksy, the adventure of anonymously creating public pieces is being matched by the similar adventure of swiping and selling them. LA Weekly photographer Ted Soqui’s report on the theft of Banksy’s Caution (after it got tagged) in East L.A. (pictured in sequence L-R above) put me in the mind of Jamaican edge-culture worker Peter Dean Rickards’s 2008 jacking of a larger piece that ol’ Mr. Anonymous tossed onto the outside wall of a Kingston pub. Rickards—who does business as Afflicted Yard—shot the video below, which also documents the amazing dynamics that can happen when a dozen Jamaican men work on the same project.
 

The Afflicted Yard: The Rock from Peter Dean Rickards on Vimeo.

 
I’m faulted with having little patience discussing the legal, ethical, and sociological ramifications of such actions. I have a feeling that’s what documentarians Alper Cagatay and Christopher Thompson may have done—among other things—in their forthcoming film How to Sell a Banksy...