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@Oliver Schick
william1984 seems to have deleted his posts about Banksy, so I can't quote him directly.
I don't think that people's appreciation of his stuff was really very much about its actual content. That was always just slightly amusing, approximately on the level of most Private Eye cartoons, never particularly earth-shattering. (I liked some of them, such as the one of the smiley riot police line that was up on the bridge across Old Street.) I think the appeal lay more in the fact that it was figurative and not particularly abstract, as opposed to most graffiti.
I also think that Blairism provided the right background for it, or it provided the right foreground, as disillusionment and apathy were so great that people appreciated every little gesture like these borderline trivial cartoons more than they might otherwise have done.