Banksy (revisted)

Article

A follow-up to an earlier Banksy post.

Small Exhibit of Pictures

(Extended) Highlights:

Banksy has parlayed his knack for reducing ideas to simple visual elements into what a critic recently termed "red nose rebellion." He is both a lefty and a tweaker of lefty pieties. At a London antiwar demonstration in 2003, he distributed signs that read "I Don't Believe In Anything. I'm Just Here for the Violence." Later, he produced revisionist oil paintings (Mona Lisa with a yellow smiley face, a pastoral landscape surrounded by crime-scene tape) and, disguised in a trenchcoat and fake beard, installed them, respectively, in the Louvre and the Tate.

and i looove what he did on the security wall in the west bank. love. heart.

Whoever he is, Banksy revels in the incongruities of his persona. "The art world is the biggest joke going," he has said. "It's a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak." Although he once declared that "every other type of art compared to graffiti is a step down,"...

Last month, a painting titled "Space Girl and Bird" sold at Bonham's for five hundred and seventy-five thousand, a Banksy record. Ralph Taylor, a specialist in the Sotheby's contemporary-art department, said of Banksy, "He is the quickest-growing artist anyone has ever seen of all time." Banksy responded to the Sotheby's sale by posting a painting on his Web site. It featured an auctioneer presiding over a crowd of rapt bidders, with the caption "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

While setting up the show in Los Angeles, Banksy ordered a pizza, ate it, and tossed the box in a Dumpster. Within weeks, the pizza box was sold on eBay, for a hundred and two dollars. The seller suggested that a few anchovies that had been left inside might yield traces of Banksy's DNA.

Rodents are a favorite motif. "Like most people, I have a fantasy that all the little powerless losers will gang up together," Banksy wrote in "Existencilism." "That all the vermin will get some good equipment and then the underground will go overground and tear this city apart." His most famous street paintings are a series of black-and-white stencilled rats, the majority of them slightly larger than life-size. Each is different, but they all possess an impish poignancy that made them an immediate hit with London pedestrians. One, a "gangster rat," painted on a wall near the Smithfield market, wears a peace-sign medallion and carries a sign that says "Welcome to Hell." Another pleads, "Please love me." Cheyenne Westphal, the chairman for contemporary art in Europe at Sotheby's, told me, "My first experience with him was in October, 2004, when he left a piece outside a party we were throwing for Damien Hirst." It was a rat, holding up a placard that read, "You lie." Banksy, typically, was flipping off the art world and begging it to notice him at the same time.

Banksy was displaying an eight-thousand-pound elephant named Tai, whose hide he had painted red and embellished with gold fleurs-de-lis, to match the wallpaper of a parlor he had constructed. (The elephant in the room, a handout proclaimed, was global poverty.) The activists said that the paint was toxic. Ed Boks, Los Angeles's general manager of animal services, said he regretted that his office had issued a permit and, after visiting the show, wrote on his blog that looking into the elephant's eyes "nearly brought me to tears." He eventually ordered the animal hosed down. The L.A. Times, which had not planned to review the show, published two stories. Al Jazeera reported on the controversy. Other people were angry about a large portrait of Mother Teresa overlaid with the words "I learnt a valuable lesson from this woman. Moisturise everyday." By Sunday, thirty thousand people, waiting in lines five blocks long, had seen the exhibition.

"Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realize that reciting red Indian proverbs makes you sound like a fucking muppet"

The gallery's motto is "Art by People," but its affiliates exhibit a caginess toward anyone outside their circle of trusted accomplices, many of whom work in semi-symbiosis. Banksy, for instance, illustrated the cover for "Think Tank," a 2003 album by the band Blur, of which Damon Albarn is a member. (Banksy later declared that he'd never do commercial work again.) Albarn went on to found Gorillaz, a band whose public face is represented by four animated characters. Remi Kabaka, who provides the voice for the band's drummer, works at the gallery as a sort of majordomo. At a recent party at a bar nearby, his name was the password for entry.

Graffiti aficionados like to say that the form is as ancient as cave drawing, and Banksy takes a similarly romantic view. "Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked," he once wrote. "Where the street was awash with a million colors and little phrases. . . . A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business." Detractors of graffiti, however, can trace its spread as assiduously as epidemiologists mapping an outbreak of diphtheria.

"Fings have gone a little bit nuts lately," Steve Lazarides said, with the burry inflection of his native city. "Suddenly, it's become all right amongst the proper art world to collect street art."

Twirling a pen, he reported that walk-in traffic at the gallery had increased fifteenfold. "We've had a lot of youth, and we're not talking about well-heeled youth," he said. "A lot of street kids, the kids who sort of hang around and hang out and what have you. They're all very polite."

I'd heard that Banksy had become "increasingly paranoid," and I wondered whether the accusations of hypocrisy had worn on him, and whether he was able to enjoy his success. "I have been called a sellout, but I give away thousands of paintings for free, how many more do you want?" he wrote. "I think it was easier when I was the underdog, and I had a lot of practise at it. The money that my work fetches these days makes me a bit uncomfortable, but that's an easy problem to solve—you just stop whingeing and give it all away. I don't think it's possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that's an irony too far, even for me." He went on, "I love the way capitalism finds a place—even for its enemies. It's definitely boom time in the discontent industry. I mean, how many cakes does Michael Moore get through?"

"Why do you do what you do?" I asked.

Banksy replied, "I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I'm not sure I like it enough."

Banksy has always had a fatalistic streak: in one of his books, a pair of lovebirds is juxtaposed with the dictum "As soon as you meet someone, you know the reason you will leave them." In another, a little girl releases a heart-shaped red balloon: "When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don't make any fuss."

after the article, i felt a bit depressed that everyone knows about him. :-/ sad.