“The young man mirrored the faded, partly painted over Banksy figure. He stood looking down, smoking in front of his ‘wall shadow’. The similarity really struck me. As did the words, “FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS (CANCELLED)”. Even the now defaced current version of a Banksy original drives the point home with more insistence. His statement is reclaimed by the local grafitti “artists”, rebels, punks, snot nosed kids who have little respect for or knowledge of a museum quality “street art” piece on “their” Chinatown wall.
Follow your dreams? That idea is cancelled? Someone scribbles over Banksy’s image and his words, they nearly erase the phantom painter. They re-write their own history in layers of street tags, in underground taunts in some in-joke way most of us won’t get or don’t care to.
Are they each staking a small, messy claim in an offbeat slice of infamy? Are they furthering the point of Banksy’s message by tarting it up a bit? Are they removing the clean, Warhol-esque, art school lines with cheap spray paint and shaky tags?
I saw the boy, I saw his shadow, I read the words, I snapped the picture. It was a moment I almost missed but felt compelled to capture it. There was something in the dignity of the moment that made me not able to look away.”
— Internet
http://champagne.tumblr.com/post/7507181912
