The painting is dominated by a dinosaur. This huge lumbering beast represents museums, and large institutions in general. Still important and powerful, but slow to move, adapt, and change. And in danger of extinction if they fail to find ways to attract visitors, and thus funding, in a world where people increasingly find their entertainment and education on-line and through other sources of new media.

The ape represents collectors like Rik Reinking and curators like Adrian Nabi. The ape, much smaller and less powerful than the dinosaur, is more agile, faster to adapt, and more able to relate to the modern world, a world that, as time goes by, changes ever more quickly. The ape has captured the dinosaur(s attention) with a lasso, and is struggling to pull it in a new direction, hauling it's head around to try and get it to focus it's short-sighted gaze at something previously ignored.

The tiny cockroach, hovering on delicate, busy wings, is the street/graffiti artist in the painting. As with graffiti (artists) the cockroach is disliked, often hated by society, but is everywhere, and more importantly, indestructible. It is said cockroaches would be the only creature to survive a nuclear war, and this fits perfectly with the graffiti bombers attitude of Can't Be Stopped.

The cockroach is linked to the collector/curator with a delicate string, tied at either end with a simple bow to show how easily the bond can be broken, either by the collector taking away their support/patronage, or the artist refusing to be brought inside (both the museum and the established art world) by the curator and returning to the freedom of the streets.

other points of interest:

Dave the Chimp's first memory of going to a museum as a child is visiting the Natural History Museum in London with his mother and seeing dinosaurs.

The dinosaur is drawn in a similar style to Walter McCay's "Gertie the Dinosaur", an animated film from 1914, which was shown in theaters with McCay interacting with the action on-screen, asking Gertie to bow to the audience, dance, and at one stage lift him in the air. McCay is best known for his wonderfully inventive and much loved "Little Nemo In Slumberland" comic strip, created in 1905.

The position of the dinosaur and ape reference images of St. George slaying a dragon. St. George is the patron saint of England, Dave the Chimp an Englishman.

The ape's left hand is in the recognised surfer "Hang Loose" shape, as if to say to the artist that he is "cool", while failing to recognise that this symbol of cool is already old fashioned (the very act of collecting is to preserve a moment that has already passed). This distant between the past and the present moment is shown again by the cockroach tagging the word "now" onto the wall. 

The artists name (chimp) is written on the spray can, not as a signature to the piece, but to show he is the tool to get across the message, just as the can has been the tool used to create millions of messages written world wide.

The abstract shapes in the background are actually the letters APE. Though Dave the Chimp never writes his name in the street, he does from time to time paint "traditional" graffiti (letters) and APE is the name he uses. The bright red and yellow are colours he often used in the street due to the positive, uplifting feeling they give (as can also be seen in the work of Os Gemeos)