Many “urban” artists have a style that appears haphazard, with colors and lines jumbled together in ways that are bold enough to mask any lack of underlying artistic talent. The inclusion of words, as in other genres, is used as a crutch by those incapable of expressing their ideas with image alone.

Vladimir Kato, a Toronto artist by way of Yugoslavia (which I was reminded recently to always preface with “the former”), combines rich color with detailed work that at first glance appears to fall into all the same traps as his urban comrades. But look closely at Straight Huffin and you can see that the shapes are exactingly rendered, the splatters and drips and solid colors combining well with the wonderfully chaotic fur and background. Even the words are well integrated, though probably redundant unless Vladimir’s goal is irony or clarification of how his work should be classified.

By Toronto artist Jolan Canrinus. Canrinus creates colorful, dramatic stencils on wood. Most of his work is focused on disc golf, family and friends.

By and large political street art, or street art with a message, is crap. The very best players create beautiful propaganda, while most of the others are cheap-shot artists, whiney ideologues or humorless vandals who produce works completely devoid of subtlety or introspection. Banksy, who’s work Stop and Search is pictured above, works at a level so far above the others there’s really no comparison.

If I remember the story correctly from high school history class, the Spartans punished their wrongdoers twice: once for doing something wrong, and once for getting caught. Last week French street artist Zevs was arrested for pouring paint on a Chanel logo he had just slapped up outside a Giorgio Armani store in Hong Kong. A friend videotaped the mischief. He was arrested immediately thereafter and pled guilty to one count of criminal damage. If there’s any justice in this world, he will be punished thrice: once for his criminal act, once for getting caught, and once for wasting everyone’s time with art that is, at best, pretty nonsense, as in the painting above, and at worst is repetitive, boring, and with only the slightest hint at meaning — bad graffiti carried out by a malicious, OCD-suffering retard all juiced-up after reading though his stack of Adbusters.

Famous quote by Pablo Picasso Banksy.

I hesitate to even upload this crap to my site, but eventually the buzz about some artist rings so loud in my ears I have to do something. The above mural is typical of Can Two, who are doubly dammed for working in a medium that, to date, has produced exactly one artist worth more than ten seconds of your time, and for making his work “kid friendly”. Stylized, aribrushed, illegible text, uninspired color choices, urban hip-hop caricatures, sloppy composition. Instead of Bombing the Suburbs, how about we tar and feather the graffiti artists?