Shortly before Hurricane Gustav, British street artist Banksy came to New Orleans to do a series of graffiti/public art pieces (you pick your name for them & I’ll pick mine) with the themes of Katrina, poverty and Fred Radke, who has made a name for himself putting blocks of battleship gray paint over graffiti in the city. The works are elaborate stencils, which gives them a level of precision most graffiti artists could only dream of, and part of the aesthetic is that the works are made be stumbled across, adding a new, unpredictable and inexplicable element to urban landscapes. If you’d rather stumble across them but want to know what you’re looking for, you can go to Banksy’s Web site. They’re not all pictured, but most are. At The Times-Picayune, Doug MacCash has been tracking the Banksy story and drama (start reading at the September 5 entry).

Part of the drama has been what will happen to the pieces. One on Elysian Fields has been boarded over – to save it, perhaps? – but one has already been painted over, though not by Radke, who Banksy set out to challenge with his work. “I came to New Orleans to do battle with the Gray Ghost, a notorious vigilante who’s been systematically painting over any graffiti he can find with the same shade of grey paint since 1997,” he writes on his Web site. “Consequently he’s done more damage to the culture of the city than any section five hurricane could ever hope to achieve.” Two pieces specifically target Radke, depicting a man painting over a horrified stick figure at one location and painting over a sunflower in another. That one, incidentally, does have some gray obscuring one of the sunflowers, but since the rest of the work is untouched, my suspicion is that the gray paint is the work of a Radke-hater trying to frame him for defacing the work. Many of the pieces are so large and so obviously crafted, it’s hard to imagine Radke taking them on. In one case, it would almost require him to repaint the wall.