Banksy bombs Detroit

Banksy appears to have made a stop in Detroit and sparked an interesting controversy. Here's the full story.

Basically, there's a gigantic abandoned building/complex in Detroit that the city has been trying to get cleaned up or removed for decades. Only - nobody seems to 'officially' own it. Nobody wants to foot that bill. So the huge eyesore has stuck around.

Now the street artist Banksy has tagged and stenciled his talent onto a crumbling concrete wall: A child with a can of red paint with the message, "I remember when all this used to be trees."

This is the beauty of intelligent street art. Banksy is a damned good artist (as well as social satirist). His works, both legal and illegal, go for 6 digits. Whether or not he meant to - Banksy lit the fuse this cleanup project needed. A non-profit art gallery came to the abandoned site and took/stole/acquired the entire wall it was painted on. Why not? Nobody owns the place.

Only now this single piece is valued at over $100,000. Suddenly people are asserting their rights to the piece via ownership of the site. The City of Detroit is waiting to see how it pans out - waiting with the bill for eradicating the god awful eyesore from their city.

Bansky's message: 'This concrete monstrosity is an ironic slap in the face of the huge forest that used to exist there.' Now - there probably won't be an entire forest supplanted there anytime soon. But his act may have been the catalyst needed to get the ball rolling on, at the very least, putting a tree or two back in the form of a city park or landscaped office park.

Here's some more Banksy outdoor works.