A glorious wall I felt awkward about

Considering graffiti is art placed illegally in a public place, some people get very defensive about the right of other artists to appropriate it. Fair enough, sometimes, I suppose, when you get things like traders on the streets of London selling postcards and posters of Banksy pieces, where they are literally reproducing it. There's little art in that. Then again, I've never spoken to them about it. Maybe they're conceptual artists playing the same one-line prank that Sherrie Levine pulled of to great effect in the eighties, or the even wittier www.aftersherrielevine.com which really is worth a look.

I say this because when I rounded the corner from the giant Banksy rat, I came across this lovely wall. I've found the same on a couple of websites when I was looking the big rat up. The same map will do too. When I rounded the corner I started looking closely at the wall for tiny hearts like the one here, then noticed that I was being watched by a lady with a Leica who was also eying up the wall. I wandered over to say hello, and it turned out she was a photographer, of portraits previously, having had a studio on Canal St nearby. She'd turned her hand to photographing walls of graffiti, she said, to some commercial success. Good stuff. But she didn't tell me her name, and hinted heavilly that she was worried about people copying her work. I gave her my card - the clearest hint of all that I was very happy with my own style and not in the least bit interested in adopting anybody elses. Then I said I'd leave her to her wall, having already spotted this little loveheart and made a note to come back later.

It was a peculiar encounter, all the more so because here we were, two artists doiung our own things no doubt in our own styles, but both appropriating the scrawl, sticker and stencil of other artists (though more often the point of my work is to be about the loves of ordinary people and the places they express them rather than just documenting the professional graffitists). I spent the afternoon wondering about this, and I hope she's checked out this blog and gets in touch, as I'd love to see what she does with her images, if only to nick a few ideas...