I was heartened this week by the defacement of a series of adverts in Holburn tube station. The ads in question depict Amy, before and after her breast enlargement. Unsurprisingly in the after shot not only has Amy undergone a mammary expansion, but she has also learned to smile and appears to have discovered photoshop. The ads now feature white stickers across the middle, emblazoned with slogans like, "You are normal. This is not." There's something distinctly warming about socially conscious vandalism.

Of course it can perhaps go too far. I am reminded an old English teacher of mine, Miss Opalinska, who once related a story about billboard graffiti she spotted near where she lived around the release of a certain controversial Prodigy album. Some individual had taken it upon themselves to remove the offending words so that the title simply read My Up.

Somewhere in the middle lies the reclusive Banksy whose artistic wit is such that his "vandalism" actually increases the value of the defaced property. He has a point, and does it with such flair, that one does not feel right in viewing him alongside the common miscreant leaving their tag like a bestial territorial marking. Instead he comments subversively on society forcing introspection upon the viewer, often without even realising. That his art speaks so loudly without a gallery — let alone a canvas or frame — sets it apart. Indeed it demonstrates the reason I feel that if art has value, it ought not to need to be placed within the framing device of a "modern art gallery" in order for its merit to become evident. So much so, in fact, that some people eventually found the need to frame it: either to auction or to publish. And so Banksy's Wall and Piece has become my recent coffee table book in an effort to channel some of that subversive wit rather than the typical dull black and white photographic compilation.