Loud is a strategy

Banksy said art can be loud, crass, and obvious. That it’s fine if it looks like the rantings of an angry adolescent.

He was right. And most of us have forgotten it.

Here’s what happened. We grew up. We got serious. We learned to sand down the edges, soften the tone, make it palatable.

We stopped shouting because shouting seemed unprofessional.

But punk wasn’t unprofessional. Punk was precise.

It said exactly what it meant, to exactly the people it meant it for, in exactly the way those people needed to hear it.

The noise wasn’t accidental. The rage wasn’t indulgent. It was a signal – so clear, so un-ignorable, that it built an entire culture in two years.

Most marketing today is the opposite. Polished into meaninglessness. Careful to the point of invisible.

What if the thing holding your work back isn’t that it’s too loud?

What if it’s not loud enough?

The rant, the screed, the wall of spray paint – they don’t appeal to everyone. They were never supposed to.

Obvious art finds its people. Quiet art finds nobody.