Stop killing my sons....

A Michelangelo-inspired wall painting near the Qalandia check point.

Contemporary visual arts practice is, for the most part, really boring.  Audiences have switched off in droves from the rampant egotism and posturings (hello, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin et al, are you listening?) of the young and not-so-young wannabees.  This kind of art just doesn't connect with ordinary people. 

An art of rejection has grown out of this.  For decades now young artists have turned to the streets, to walls, to railway carriages as their canvas of choice.  I'm not talking about the brain-dead "taggers" who disfigure our cities with their repetitive tags, but to the genuine graffiti artists who have something new and original and heartfelt to say.  Crikey, some have even become rich, like Banksy, or been subsumed by the mega-rich art market (Basquiat, Keith Haring and so on) and received the ultimate accolade - their paintings reproduced on tea towels and coffee mugs!

Massive, bland, obscenely expensive, Israel's separation or apartheid wall is a metaphor for the New York art scene.  However, in an act of subversion, graffiti artists from around the world have turned it into a huge canvas for their ideas and beliefs.  Over the next short while I'd like to share some of this with you.