CRASH? BANG! WALLOP£

One of the many ways in which the internet has benefited the journalistic proffession is in the realm of foriegn correspondancy. Used to be you had to fly an entire studio crew out to the front line with a full platoon, bankroll insurance polocies for celebrity journalists, heads of department and an army of cameramen and tech-heads, only to have to can most of your footage when the intern gets his head blown into pieces by a stray bullet right in the middle of shooting. Used to be foriegn correspondant shit was serious business. Nowadays forgiegn correspondance work is so easy and convinient it's got to the point where you can ring up bored war correspondants off-the-cuff and get them to ask random passers-by whether they think Banksy is an overhyped art-phag then mail you a video response direct from the Israeli - Palestine border.

THANKS DION NISSENBAUM. THANKS MARTYN NUART.

Notable quotes:

"Those of you out there that have eyes, ears, bum-holes and breathe oxygen will have probably heard of the UK’s #1 graffiti don, underground, art-bloke and all-round subversive genius Banksy."

- This Banksy guy is a pretty cool guy, eh?

"Banksy’s giant picture of a flower on a wall somewhere in Lambeth managed to make headlines across the front pages of the nation’s press when it appeared on 29 Oct last year, easily shrugging off front-page competition in the form of an attempted repeat of 05’s disastrous Delhi bombings, more carnage in Iraq and the election of Argentina’s first ever female president..."

- Banksy's flower is serious business.

"It should also be noted that the exhibition featured work from more than 30 other artists, among them Souleiman Mansour, Abed al Rohan Mousain, Ron English and Sir Peter Blake. Indeed, artists from Ramallah, Gaza and Bethlehem’s Dehaisha refugee camp were well represented..."

- But nobody gives a shit about that.

“Among Palestinians in Bethlehem, I would say there is a mix of views. Some support the project and are helping to put it on. Others took away the wrong message from some of the works. For example, some people thought that Banksy's trademark rat with the slingshot was suggesting that Palestinians were rats. Similarly, one person who saw the soldier questioning the donkey thought Banksy was suggesting that Palestinians were donkeys. There are some who think that artists should not use the wall as a canvas because it takes something they see as an ugly outgrowth of the conflict and transforms it into something beautiful.”

- Our 'man in the middle East', War correspondent Dion Nissenbaum

This article originally appeared on Don't Panic Australia's mail out magazine.

WORDS: SHORRN X

PHOTOGRAPHY: MARTYN NU-ART