Straight off the Streets

Stenciled on a swathe of fake white bricks, which is hung in a tidy frame, are the words "Lying to the police is never wrong." This cheesy effect of cheaply packaged protest happens to be a product of the world's most famous graffiti artist, Banksy, though it brings to mind a trinket you'd find in a tourist vendor's cart by London's Millennium Bridge, next to the anarchy buttons and postcards of punks. An anonymous Brit (or so legend has it), Banksy is currently the subject of a show at Vanina Holasek Gallery that has been conceived by the sort of person who thinks Che Guevara T-shirts denote radicalism.

He is known for his wickedly sophisticated graffiti imagery, often made with stencils and seen on buildings and other street-side venues in London, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. His pranks are the envy of urban anarchists worldwide: He once managed to sneak his work onto the walls of four New York museums — MoMA, the Met, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History — in one day.

"Banksy Does New York" is spread out over three floors of a small townhouse, which has been decorated with a 12-year-old's notion of urban grit. Beer bottles, soda cans, and a prop-like, oversized cigarette pack are strewn over something that looks like a bit of hedgerow in a corner of the first floor. One steps over the painted outline of a corpse on the floor next to it to read a what appears to be a police barrier set against the back wall, but which turns out to be a joke: "Polite Line," it reads, "Do Not Get Cross." Embarrassed is more like it. Rat-traps line the banister going up the stairs; the walls have been splattered with dainty drippings of diluted paint meant, one supposes, to resemble spray paint.

Perhaps the gallery owner felt this staginess was needed because the work — some of which is hung deliberately askew or upside down to indicate the edgy nature of the installation — can't hold the wall on its own. Most of the pieces here, such as "Rude Copper" (2002), in which a stenciled cop gives the finger, are multiples. But there is the occasional unique piece, such as "Jack and Jill" (2005), in which a stenciled boy and girl — she carrying a picnic basket — are seen wearing flak jackets that say "police." Incidentally, "Jack and Jill" is priced at $400,000 — a bit steep for a souvenir of an urban safari.

What is utterly lost here is the element of surprise engendered when serendipitously encountering one of these images on the street, where their genuinely wry and incisive humor exhibit a kind of guerrilla brilliance. Stumbling upon the black-and-white girl who has just accidentally allowed the wind to take her bright red, heart-shaped balloon, or two cops kissing, or a cop frisking a little girl who "assumes the position" next to her teddy bear and lunch box, is to watch a genius thug head-butt the powers that be.

In the gallery, though, it all feels like self-imitation. The plaints here have no more power or subtlety than bumper stickers. A monochrome Churchill sports a green Mohawk made of grass in "Turf War," while in "Pulp Fiction" (2004), the killers played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in the Quentin Tarantino film hold out yellow bananas rather than guns. In the silkscreen "Napalm" (2004), Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald cheerfully escort the naked Vietnamese girl down from the famous Vietnam War-era photograph — a particularly ironic work to include in a show that so Disney-fies graffiti art.

And therein lies the problem: how to take street art off of the street without taming it? Jean-Michel Basquiat found an answer in successfully sullying gallery walls with gutter trash. Yet Basquiat translated his style to the canvas, rather than merely reproducing his tags with a silkscreen. Banksy — assuming it is Banksy producing these works — has done nothing more than copy his own attitude. Thus we get a broken piece of drywall, painted orange, with the slogan "People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one" printed on it.

His attempts at translating his style into art fare no better than his other attempts at waving his own flag. There's a print of the supermodel Kate Moss looking like Marilyn Monroe and done in the style of Andy Warhol. I forget at which poster shop in which suburban mall I first saw this piece. Nearby, and continuing the Warhol theme, hang some half-hearted tomato soup cans — except these come not from Campbell's but from Tesco. Banksy doing Warhol is no more convincing than Banksy doing the tamed version of Banksy, which has something to do with rats. Rats abound here: There are many versions of his image of a stenciled rat with a boom box standing in front of a spray-painted peace sign, there are rats in traps, and then, of course, there's the smell of ...

Downstairs at the front desk, you can pick up a postcard version of the Kate Moss for $20. You can also purchase posters and Tshirts. All of these things should leave you in no doubt that "Banksy Does New York" is to art what the Hard Rock Café was to CBGB.

Until December 29 (502 W. 27th St. at Tenth Avenue, 212-367-9093).