New Banksy? Whatever. Graffiti is just a tame in-joke for Guardian readers

A mural near GCHQ is typical of the British street artist's instinct for trendy political content to impress his bourgeois public

Once graffiti was a guttural art. It was rude and threatening. Respectable people abhorred it. Artists like Jean Dubuffet found "raw" beauty in it.

Now it is a tame in-joke shared by a middle class so schooled in street art that homeowners are delighted to wake up with a daub on the side of their house if they think it may be a valuable Banksy. "It's pretty good," said Karren Smith of Cheltenham this week when she saw what was painted on her home overnight: a bunch of spooks from nearby GCHQ setting up a phone tap on a public phonebox.

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