Street Art and Banksy: A History of Graffiti, Explained

Nobody knows who first scratched a name into a wall, but the habit is old enough that archaeologists treat it as evidence. In Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, walls still carry election notices, and one thermopolium (a street-side food shop) bears an electoral inscription naming its innkeeper. Nearly two thousand years later, a New York messenger who signed himself TAKI 183 got a newspaper profile, and the modern graffiti movement had a spark. This article follows the line from those walls to Banksy, and separates what research shows from what the legend says.

Key takeaways

Marking walls is ancient. Hand stencils in caves are at least tens of thousands of years old, and ancient Mediterranean cities were covered in public writing.
Modern graffiti took shape in Philadelphia and New York in the late 1960s and 1970s, when tags such as Cornbread and TAKI 183 spread across city surfaces and subway cars.
Graffiti and street art overlap but differ: graffiti is mostly stylized lettering for a crew or writer, while street art usually uses images aimed at a general audience.
Experiments show visible disorder can encourage other rule-breaking, but the wider broken windows policy claims are contested.
Banksy's works, anonymity, and the 2018 shredding stunt show how street art collides with the art market and the law.

The oldest impulse: people have always marked walls

The urge to leave a mark on a surface is older than writing. Cave art includes hand stencils, made by placing a hand on the wall and covering the surrounding area with pigment so the hand appears as a negative shape. A 2014 uranium-thorium study gave a hand stencil from Maros, Sulawesi, a minimum age of 39,900 years, and a 2018 study of Iberian cave art concluded that some of it is "older than 64.8 thousand years," an age that implies Neanderthal artists, according to the Wikipedia survey of cave painting.

Lascaux in France, often cited as the oldest "graffiti," is much younger, about 17,000 years old, and the Chauvet cave paintings date to roughly 35,000 and 30,000 years ago. Whether these images were ceremonial, social, or personal is debated. Calling them graffiti stretches the word, but the instinct they reflect, to put a human mark where others will see it, is shared.

Written graffiti in antiquity

Writing that ordinary people scratched or painted on walls appears in many ancient places. According to the Wikipedia history of graffiti, the oldest known written graffito was found on the Greek island of Astypalaia and dates to around 500 BC, and visitors to the fortress of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka left more than 1,800 graffiti between the 6th and 18th centuries. Medieval stonemasons' marks, called tacherons, were scratched on Romanesque church walls in Scandinavia, and Renaissance artists carved their names into the rooms of Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome.

Pompeii gives the fullest picture of everyday wall writing because ash sealed the city. Its walls carry electoral notices, such as the one on the thermopolium of Asellina, and scrawls in colloquial Latin that contrast with the formal language of classical authors, as the Wikipedia entry on Pompeii notes. Even looters left a comment: one graffito reads "house dug." The eruption's date is itself a case of graffiti solving a puzzle: a charcoal inscription found in 2018 includes the date October 17, one of the clues pointing to an autumn eruption rather than the August date long assumed.

The practical lesson from antiquity is that public walls worked as a communication network before newspapers. Candidates advertised on them, residents argued on them, and nobody needed permission. That function, a cheap, public, unfiltered channel, is the thread connecting Pompeii to the modern movement.

1960s Philadelphia and New York: the tag becomes a movement

Modern graffiti began with names. In Philadelphia, a teenager named Darryl McCray, born in 1953 and raised in Brewerytown, wrote the nickname Cornbread across North Philadelphia in the late 1960s. He claimed to be the first to tag his own name rather than a gang's, and a 1967 inscription reading "Cornbread Loves Cynthia" suggests his tagging was underway by then. In 1971, after news reports misidentified another man as Cornbread, he tagged an elephant at the Philadelphia Zoo to get the press's attention, per Wikipedia's entry on Cornbread.

In New York, a foot messenger from Washington Heights who went by TAKI 183 became the movement's best-known early name. TAKI came from his given name, Demetrios, and 183 from his street. The New York Times profiled him on July 21, 1971, under the headline "'Taki 183' Spawns Pen Pals," and his tag inspired hundreds of imitators, according to the TAKI 183 entry. The profile did what a tag cannot do alone: it told every other kid that a name on a wall could make you known.

The subway as a rolling billboard

The New York subway was the perfect medium. A train carries a name across the whole city, past people who might never visit the artist's neighborhood. Writers competed for fame by getting up often, in difficult places, and in distinctive styles. A short signature is a tag. A quick, bubble-lettered outline is a throw-up. A larger, multicolored work is a piece, short for masterpiece. These terms are widely used in graffiti culture, although practitioners differ on the finer definitions.

By the early 1980s the pieces had grown to cover whole train cars. The Wikipedia article on street art notes that the art form peaked in the 1980s with full-car subway murals, especially in the Bronx. The city fought back with barriers and police dogs, a conflict documented in Style Wars, which aired on PBS in 1983, played in theaters in 1984, and won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for documentary that year. The film included the views of writers, police, transit workers, and then-mayor Ed Koch, so it showed both sides.

Why the photographs mattered

A painted train lasted days or weeks before being cleaned or buried under new work. Photography preserved it. Subway Art, by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, was published in 1984 by Thames & Hudson in London and Holt, Rinehart and Winston in New York, and has sold about 500,000 copies. It is often called the bible of the form, and for many works its photographs are the only record. In effect, the book exported the New York style: it is credited with marking the start of graffiti on London rail cars.

The movement also spread through people. In 1983, Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 carried hip-hop graffiti to Paris and London, according to the Wikipedia graffiti history. By the end of the decade, local scenes with their own styles existed on several continents.

From the street to the gallery

Galleries took notice early. Fashion Moda in the Bronx, along with the Now Gallery and Fun Gallery in Manhattan's East Village, were among the first to show graffiti artists in the early 1980s. Two figures made the crossing most visibly.

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz sprayed poetic "SAMO" messages across Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s. Basquiat's first American solo show came in 1982, when he was 21, and the same year he became the youngest artist at Documenta in Kassel. He died in 1988 at 27. In May 2017 his 1982 skull painting Untitled sold for a record $110.5 million, according to the Wikipedia biography.

Keith Haring began chalk drawings on blank black advertising panels in New York subway stations in December 1980 and stopped in 1986, when his Pop Shop opened in SoHo, selling shirts and posters at accessible prices. In June 1986 he was arrested over his Crack Is Wack mural on the FDR Drive wall in East Harlem, which police first treated as vandalism, and he was released on a lesser charge after media coverage, per the Haring biography. The case shows how thin the line between vandalism and public art can be in the eyes of the law.

The art market's embrace of these artists raises a question that runs through the rest of this article: what happens to an art form built on being free and unauthorized when a single work sells for more than most people earn in a lifetime? For that tension in another context, see why abstract art sells for millions.

Graffiti versus street art: where the line falls

The two terms overlap, and artists often work in both. The Wikipedia article on street art offers a useful rule of thumb: graffiti typically uses stylized words to represent a writer or crew, while street art usually uses images or symbols meant to be understood by everyone. Graffiti is usually unauthorized, while street art can now be commissioned. The philosopher Nick Riggle's formulation is that a work is street art if its material use of the street is internal to its meaning.

Feature	Graffiti	Street art
Typical content	Names, stylized lettering	Images, symbols, slogans
Intended audience	Other writers, crews, local scene	General public
Main goal	Fame within the scene, getting up	Communication, commentary, beautification
Usual legal status	Unauthorized	Unauthorized or commissioned
Typical tools	Markers, spray paint	Stencils, paste-ups, murals, installations
Example figures	TAKI 183, Cornbread	Blek le Rat, Banksy

Street art has its own pre-Banksy history. Gérard Złotykamień (Zloty) began spray-painted public works in Paris in 1963, Blek le Rat introduced pre-cut stencils in the 1970s, and Franco the Great began painting Harlem's metal store gates in 1978, according to the street art entry. Stencils matter because they are fast: the artist cuts the image in advance and sprays it in seconds, which suits work done without permission.

Many of the movement's pieces also have physical lives of their own. Spray paint is pigment in a binder, and murals fade, flake, and get painted over. To understand why a wall painted in the open weathers differently from one in a museum, see why colors fade and, for the opposite extreme, why fresco painting is so durable. For the broader global picture, the guide to street art around the world covers scenes beyond the ones discussed here.

Why people tag: what psychology can and cannot say

Why would someone risk arrest to write a name on a wall? The honest answer is that no single explanation covers everyone, and many accounts rest on interviews and observation, not controlled experiments. Several motives recur in accounts from writers themselves and from researchers.

Recognition. A tag is a name seen by strangers. For young people with few routes to public recognition, getting up can be a way to be known. The TAKI 183 story fits: the newspaper profile, not the tag itself, turned him into a model.

Competition and craft. Writers describe a scene with rules, mentors, and rivalry. Mastering lettering styles takes years of practice, and status comes from skill, consistency, and risk.

Territory and belonging. Crews mark their areas and signal membership. This is the reading most people reach for, borrowed from how animals mark territory, though human motives are layered and the analogy only goes so far.

A neutral way to say all this is that graffiti is communication by people who lack other channels, which is how the early scene saw itself. That does not mean every act is harmless, and the next section looks at the evidence on what visible disorder does to the people who see it.

Does graffiti spread disorder? The broken windows evidence

In March 1982, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling published "Broken Windows" in The Atlantic. Their argument was that "one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares," and that visible signs of neglect invite more disorder and, eventually, more serious crime. Philip Zimbardo's 1969 experiment with abandoned cars in the Bronx and Palo Alto is often cited as support, though critics note the Palo Alto car had been moved to a campus and Zimbardo's own students were the first to smash it, per the Wikipedia article on broken windows theory.

The best controlled evidence comes from Kees Keizer and colleagues at the University of Groningen, who ran field experiments in which people were secretly observed in places with and without visible disorder. Their results, published in Science in 2008, found that one kind of disorder, such as graffiti or litter, can encourage another, such as stealing. The study is an experiment about small, specific behaviors in specific places, not a measurement of crime rates in a city.

What the broader record shows

Turning the theory into policy is where the evidence thins out. William Bratton enforced quality-of-life offenses, including graffiti, as head of the Transit Police in 1990 and later as New York police commissioner, and a 2001 study by Kelling and William Sousa found that crime dropped. Critics offered other explanations: Harcourt and Ludwig found regression toward the mean could explain the precinct-level changes, the crack epidemic was waning, and crime fell in many cities whether or not they adopted the policy.

A 2015 meta-analysis by Anthony Braga and colleagues found that strategies focused on fixing disorder in places reduced crime, but aggressive order-maintenance arrests of individuals did not. In Lowell, Massachusetts, cleaning up physical disorder in hot spots was associated with a 20 percent reduction in police calls. Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush argued that collective efficacy, the willingness of neighbors to act together, matters more than disorder itself. Critics also point out that "disorder" is vague enough to invite discriminatory enforcement.

The fair summary: seeing graffiti may nudge some behavior in specific settings, changing the physical environment can help, and treating writers as the main cause of crime is not well supported. Related ideas about how visible behavior shapes what people think is normal appear in social proof psychology.

Banksy: how a stencil artist became a global figure

Banksy began in the Bristol graffiti scene in the early 1990s as a freehand writer in a crew called DryBreadZ, then switched to stencils around 2000. His first known large mural, The Mild Mild West, dates to 1997. His stencils tend toward anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-establishment themes, often paired with a slogan, according to the Wikipedia entry on Banksy.

Why do the pieces land? The method is incongruity. A child reaching for a heart-shaped balloon, a masked protester throwing a bouquet instead of a bomb: each takes a familiar image and puts it where it does not belong, so the viewer has to resolve the clash. The works are short arguments in picture form, and the humor makes them easy to share.

A timeline of the projects that built the reputation

Date	Project	What happened
August 2005	West Bank barrier	Several images painted on the Israeli West Bank barrier
June 13, 2009	Banksy vs Bristol Museum	More than 100 works, 78 new; over 300,000 visits across twelve weeks, per Wikipedia
January 2010	Exit Through the Gift Shop	Premiered at Sundance; nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar in January 2011
October 2013	Better Out Than In	A month-long New York residency; a Fifth Avenue stall sold canvases for US$60 each
Aug to Sept 2015	Dismaland	A "bemusement park" in Weston-super-Mare, open August 21 to September 27
2017	Walled Off Hotel	A hotel in Bethlehem that Banksy financed
November 2022	Ukraine murals	Murals in towns around Kyiv, including Borodianka, Irpin, and Horenka

Several of these are not wall paintings at all. Dismaland, a satirical theme park, and the Walled Off Hotel treat the whole experience as the work. The New York stall, selling original canvases at a price far below their market value, was a commentary on how art is priced.

The shredded painting

On October 5, 2018, Banksy's Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby's London for £1,042,000 and then partly shredded itself, through a mechanism hidden in the frame. Banksy's representatives later renamed the work Love Is in the Bin. On October 14, 2021, Sotheby's resold it for £18,582,000, about US$25.3 million, a record for the artist, against a pre-sale guide of £4 million to £6 million, according to Wikipedia's account.

The irony is hard to miss. An act meant to puncture the art market made the object roughly 18 times more valuable. Whether that proves the stunt failed or that it succeeded as commentary is a matter of taste, but it is a clean demonstration of how a market absorbs criticism. The same dynamic shapes prices across the art world, and Banksy's place among his peers appears in the most influential artists of the 21st century.

Anonymity: protection, brand, and legal problem

Banksy has never publicly confirmed his identity. In 2008, The Mail on Sunday reported that he is likely Robin Gunningham, and in 2016 researchers at Queen Mary University of London used geographic profiling, a technique from criminal investigation, and found that the locations of his works correlated with Gunningham's known movements. These are press and academic inferences, and no identification has been confirmed by Banksy.

Anonymity serves several purposes. A 2003 Guardian profile attributed to Banksy the view that anonymity is vital because graffiti is illegal. It also makes the work the whole story: viewers have no celebrity biography to project onto the image. And, increasingly, it has legal costs. Since May 2009, Banksy's authentication body, Pest Control, has been the only point of sale for new works.

The trademark case

On September 14, 2020, the European Union Intellectual Property Office ruled that Banksy's "Flower Thrower" trademark was filed in bad faith and was invalid, in a case brought by the greeting-card company Full Colour Black. The ruling illustrates the legal bind: copyright and trademark protections usually assume an identifiable owner, and an artist who will not be identified has a harder time enforcing them.

What public murals do for neighborhoods

Murals sit between street art and public policy. The best-known program in the United States, Mural Arts Philadelphia, began in 1984 when artist Jane Golden proposed to the head of the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network a program called "Umbrella," which would steer graffiti writers toward other art forms. Several taggers were offered a choice between jail and participating. The Mural Arts Project was founded in 1986 as a division of the network, and it has helped create more than 4,000 murals, about 2,000 of which are still viewable, according to the Mural Arts Philadelphia entry.

The program also shows how the line between graffiti and public art is administrative. It has employed former graffiti writers, so some people who would once have been arrested for painting walls are now paid for it. This article has found no rigorous source showing that murals reduce crime or stress, so it does not claim that. The documented effects are narrower: employment and training for artists, community participation in making the work, and a change in how a city treats people who paint walls.

Law, conservation, and the fate of the work

Penalties for unauthorized graffiti vary widely. In the United Kingdom, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted in July 2008 of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million, and five received prison sentences of 18 months to two years. Singapore's Vandalism Act led to the 1994 caning of Michael P. Fay, whose sentence was reduced to four lashes. Australia allows fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.

Ownership is murky. A work painted without permission on someone else's wall raises questions about who owns it, whether it can be removed, and whether the artist has rights. A 2014 Bristol case over a Banksy piece on plywood is one example, and in the United States copyright may apply to legally installed works that are original and fixed in a tangible form, lasting the life of the artist plus 70 years, according to the street art article. Artists have also sued over commercial use: H&M was sued by the writer Jason "Revok" Williams over an advertisement, and argued the work was the product of criminal conduct. Such cases often settle.

Protection has its own paradox. In 2008 a perspex screen was installed to protect a Banksy stencil in Melbourne that had survived since 2003. Protecting a piece that was meant to be temporary changes what it is, which is why conservators and artists disagree about whether to preserve street art at all. The technical difficulty of preservation is outlined in the explainers on pigments and ancient Egyptian pigment science, which show how binders and pigments decide how long any painted surface survives.

Another modern question is what happens when machines make images in the style of street artists. For that debate, see AI art, copyright, and ethics.

Common misconceptions

"Street art is just vandalism." Some of it is unauthorized and illegal, and some is commissioned. The same image can be a crime on one wall and a contract on another, which is why legal status says little about artistic intent.

"Banksy invented street art." Zloty was painting in Paris in 1963, Blek le Rat was stenciling in the 1970s, and the New York subway scene was thriving long before Banksy. His contribution was conceptual and strategic, not the medium.

"Murals prove that art reduces crime." The strongest evidence for place-based change concerns fixing physical disorder, such as the Lowell results, not murals specifically. The honest position is that this link is not well established.

"The shredding failed, so the stunt backfired." The work's resale for £18,582,000 shows the market absorbing the protest, but the same event also made the object a much more famous one. Success depends on what you think the stunt was for.

FAQ

Q: What is the difference between graffiti and street art? A: Conventionally, graffiti is stylized lettering such as tags, throw-ups, and pieces, made for a writer or crew and usually unauthorized. Street art uses images or symbols aimed at the general public and can be commissioned. The boundary is contested, and many artists work in both traditions.

Q: Who started modern graffiti? A: No single person did. Cornbread tagged his name across Philadelphia in the late 1960s, and TAKI 183 of Washington Heights was profiled in The New York Times on July 21, 1971, which sparked a wave of imitators. The subway cars of 1970s New York then turned tagging into a movement.

Q: Is Banksy's identity known? A: Banksy has never confirmed an identity. Press reports since 2008 have named Robin Gunningham, and a 2016 geographic profiling study found his movements correlated with Banksy's work locations. Treat it as reported, not confirmed.

Q: Why did Banksy's painting shred itself? A: Girl with Balloon partly shredded through a mechanism in its frame immediately after selling at Sotheby's on October 5, 2018 for £1,042,000. It was renamed Love Is in the Bin, and resold on October 14, 2021 for £18,582,000. The stunt was widely read as a comment on the art market.

Q: Does graffiti cause more crime? A: The evidence is mixed. A 2008 Science field study found that visible disorder like graffiti can encourage other rule-breaking in the same place. But large claims about crime rates are contested: critics attribute New York's crime drop to other causes, and a meta-analysis found that fixing disorder in places helped, while aggressive arrests did not.

Q: Was cave art a form of graffiti? A: Only loosely. Hand stencils and animal paintings are marks made on surfaces by people, and the oldest are tens of thousands of years old. But researchers debate whether they were ceremonial, communicative, or personal, so the comparison shows a shared instinct, not an identical practice.

Q: Why is Banksy's anonymity legally significant? A: In September 2020 the EU Intellectual Property Office invalidated his "Flower Thrower" trademark as filed in bad faith, in a case brought by Full Colour Black. Intellectual property systems usually assume an identifiable rights holder, so an anonymous artist faces extra hurdles in enforcing ownership.

The takeaway

Graffiti is best understood as a communication system that people built when no other was open to them, from the election notices at Pompeii to the tags on a 1970s subway car. Street art is what happens when that system gets pictures, a general audience, and, eventually, a market. Banksy's career shows all three stages at once: an anonymous Bristol stencilist, a satirist of the art world, and the author of a stunt that made the establishment richer.

The research is more modest than the legends. Visible disorder can encourage small-scale rule-breaking in a specific place, but turning that into a theory of crime has drawn serious criticism, and the claim that murals measurably calm a city is not yet backed by strong evidence. What does hold up is the simplest idea: a wall is a public medium, and who is allowed to use it is a question about power as much as about art.

Sources

Wikipedia: Graffiti, Street art, Cave painting, Pompeii
Wikipedia: Taki 183, Cornbread, Style Wars, Subway Art
Wikipedia: Banksy, Love Is in the Bin
Wikipedia: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Mural Arts Philadelphia
Wikipedia: Broken windows theory, which summarizes Wilson and Kelling (The Atlantic, March 1982), Keizer et al. (Science, 2008), and the later critiques cited above

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