A show of graffiti art at London’s Piccadilly Circus that included Banksy and other prominent practitioners of the form was shut down on Thursday over—well, kids, it was shut down over graffiti.
The show, “Long Dark Tunnel,” had been open for three weeks and had welcomed thousands of visitors, according to the organizer, Arts Arkade. Prominent artists like 10Foot, Tox, and Fume were also on the roster.
The venue for the show, just steps from Piccadilly Circus, is owned by the Crown Estate, which belongs to the monarch and manages a real estate portfolio reportedly worth about $20.4 billion. The show was organized along with the London publication Big Issue, which is part of Big Issue Group, a social enterprise and B corporation founded in 1991 with the goal “to help millions of people in the U.K. affected by poverty to earn, learn and thrive.”
A tag reading “Fuck the King” appeared partway through the show’s run along with other incidents of vandalism, and the Crown Estate, according to the Times of London, pressured Arts Arkade to deal with the damage.
“Following serious incidents of vandalism and criminal damage to Arts Arkade and some of our neighbors’ buildings,” the organization said on Instagram, “we have regretfully taken the decision to close the ‘Long Dark Tunnel’ exhibition earlier than scheduled. The criminal damage we’ve experienced is totally unacceptable and is not a matter we take lightly.”
A stencil and spray paint artwork by Banksy in Camden Town in London, England, 2011. Photo: Jim Dyson/Getty Images.
Banksy and Tox go way back. The anonymous artist actually created a work on the subject of Tox in Camden Town in 2011. It shows a small child with a soap bubble wand, out of which a Tox tag seems to emerge. Tox had recently been sentenced to 27 months for his activities, with the prosecutor criticizing his work by telling the court, “He is no Banksy.”
10Foot was not shy in the wake of the show’s closure, telling the Times: “It’s the same old story: we’re treated as antisocial idiots and they won’t engage in dialogue with us when we do something widely recognized as positive. Getting bullied by the powerful really makes you feel like a fox being chased by the hunt.
“We threw everything at this show with nothing but good, generative intention,” he continued. “People have come from all over the country in their hundreds. We raised hundreds of thousands for homeless people. But when someone’s written ‘f*** the King’ in the middle of the night, we’ve been told we’re a risk and they have pulled the plug. They could clean it off but instead they’d prefer to throw us under the bus.”
During the show’s run, there were also incidents involving promotional posters and some apparent guerrilla postering, according to the Times, which indicated that workers apparently in Crown Estate-issued outfits removed a promotional poster outside the show. “Soon after the large poster was replaced by smaller posters,” wrote the paper, “with the artists’ tags above red Latin script reading graf scriptores decollabuntur—meaning graffiti artists ‘will be decapitated.’” The party responsible for the threatening posters is apparently unknown.
“We cannot comment on an ongoing police investigation,” said a representative of the Crown Estate in an email, which also named Arts Arkade as the one responsible for shutting the show down. Arts Arkade did not respond to a request for comment.
This wouldn’t be the first time that a graffiti exhibition seemed to inspire unwanted imitators. When Jeffrey Deitch, the art dealer who briefly served as director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, unveiled his “Art in the Streets” show in 2011, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the police department reported an uptick in graffiti and vandalism in the museum’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.
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