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Banksy was nominated as Webby person of the year in 2014 and ​world’s 100 most influential people in 2010 from Times magazine ​due to the attention that he brought using his dark humor antiauthoritarian art. The artworks that Banksy has created over the past decades have influenced people around the world with a call for change by using his art to mirror the society, propel global justice movements, and highlight certain issues to places where people are being tolerated.

Graffiti is commonly used as an a​ntisocial behaviour in order to gain recognition from the public or the government. Banksy, who is popular among the public, uses graffiti as a medium to express the part of truth people tend to take no notice of(Polinovsky, 2013). ​A series of graffiti that illustrates the true face of our society such as, ‘Nobody Likes Me’ a graffiti of a kid crying over social media attention/recognition where the kid represent the future , ‘Spy Booth’ a three stenciled spies around an existing telephone box using surveillance equipment to listen to conversations of the users, and ‘Mobile Lovers’ a piece of work depicting a man and woman playing their smartphones, standing close as if they are kissing. Each artwork unveils things that are hidden in our society that are also embedded in our daily lives, we, people, do not recognise. ‘Nobody Likes Me’ portrays the addiction of the recognition in social media that we need to get lots of likes and followers, ‘Spy Booth’ portrays the insecurity of our communications that the elites or ones with power might be eavesdropping, and ‘Mobile Lover’ portrays how we now concentrate on what is on our mobile devices than what is in front of us.

The fact that Banksy had created a great deal of work that creates a justice movement to make it better, it has made a huge impact that the people started to call it ‘The Banksy Effect’. It is simply a sudden increased interest in street art where “Banksy created a new brainwave of artistic creation.”(Gilbride, 2018). His art then later appears to be about art, society, and the political world, also reducing the gap between fine art and street art(Brenner, 2019, p. 37). The Banksy Effect also led to justice movements, many of his admirers have raised their voice when Banksy started something. Back in 2018, Banksy created an artwork in New York to fight for Zehra Doğan, who was arrested for painting a watercolour of a photograph depicting Turkish military force, destroying the Kurdish town of Nusaybin. The artwork that is a protest over the imprisonment of Zehra Doğan illustrates tally marks that both represent numbers of days she has been imprisoned and iron cages that locked her up. One of the tally marks appears in her portrait behind bars holding tally which is replaced with a pencil. Banksy then later posted Zehra’s painting along with the real picture on Instagram with the writing “One year ago Zehra Dogan was jailed for painting this watercolour of a photograph she saw in the newspaper. Protest against this injustice by re-gramming her painting and tagging Turkey’s President Erdogan.”(Banksy, 2018) and also use the hashtag #FREEzehradogan to spread the word.

People admire and were also influenced by Banksy because his graffiti evokes attention to the awfulness of the environment in the Middle East where living standard is nowhere near average. Some of his art illustrates how citizens in the Middle East live their life under poverty and violation like an artwork in Port Talbot, ‘Season’s Greeting’ a winter festival graffiti of a child opening his mouth thinking he is catching snowflakes on his tongue, but actually catching ashes from a burning garbage bin(Budgen, 2018). Another well known anti-war graffiti in Jerusalem ‘Love Is In The Air’ depicting a terrorist in an action for throwing flowers instead of

grenades, symbolizing to make peace instead of war. Banksy didn’t stop there, he created a much larger art installment ​– a hotel with a concept of “the worst view in the world”– in Palestine, Bethlehem. “The Walled Off Hotel” was intended to be built next to the eight metres concrete West Bank Wall built by Israel to give a taste of Palestinian life under Israel’s military infrastructure. The wall was created to separate and segregate the Palestinian population from the Jews in Israel(Brenner, 2019, p. 35). The hotel was going to open for only a year, but due to the popularity of the hotel that it was a top tourist attraction and was enhancing the tourism industry, the hotel is still welcoming ones who seek to experience the decay of the society.

Every piece that Banksy has created always has one explicit message: a call for change using many various kinds of ways to convey: r​evealing the society that we live in, support justice, and raising awareness to places that was shattered by oppression. He uses his art as a tool to get attention from the world to recognise what is happening in our world, from graffiti in New York or a dystopian park in Somerset to a huge art installation hotel in Bethlehem. Banksy always tries to find a way to change the world in a creative way.