It's funny how commercial Banksy's art has become. People track down his art, rip it out of walls and sell it for millions of dollars to the very people that the art is mocking.
I like what Max Tempkin said in regards to selling people literal crap for $6 a piece: "... [T]here's no protesting capitalism. There's nothing you can say about capitalism that it won't subsume and sell back to you." [1]
My favourite story on a similar note is how a Marc Jacob's boutique was vandalised a few years ago. The vandal spray painted "ART" across the front of the store. Marc Jacobs responded by photographing it and putting it on a teeshirt and selling it for $700.
Geez, it's depressing what this stuff says about us. The definition of "art" becomes "anything produced by an Approved Artist," nothing less or more. If I showed up at the Frieze Gallery trying to sell them a piece of shit on a plate, they'd laugh in my face. If I produced documentation proving that the plate had in fact been shat upon by Andy Warhol, it would suddenly be Art and worth a fortune. If I revealed that I had faked the documentation, it would suddenly be worthless again--unless the whole routine had attracted enough attention for the art world to crown me a Designated Artist, in which case anything I smeared shit on henceforth would become, by fiat, Art.
There is literally no quality intrinsic to the work itself that contributes to its status as Art. Traditionally someone says "Hah, I could have made that," and someone else smiles smugly and says "Yes, but you didn't, did you?" The thing is, it wouldn't matter if I had. I'm not an Artist, so wouldn't be Art.
Art is reduced to nothing more than a subset of Celebrity.
Richard Prince could print out this post and sell it for $50,000.
The escape hatch to this ghastly affair is to stop thinking about art in terms of notoriety or commercial value, or the product of a profession. Art as commodity is a depressing concept, I agree. Art as social status is, too. A lot of things are depressing when they are forced to fit our Procrustean socioeconomic institutions.
I believe that if one thinks about art in a deeply personal way, everyone has the spark of an artist and everything they do can be artful. With art everywhere, art feels far more alive. I believe that art is the humanness left behind in an artifact by its creator that has no significance except that a human being put it there. Objects that have no meaning except that a human being made them feel powerful. They are human subjectivity rendered tangible. To bear one is to bear something deeply strange and wholly familiar.
Well, Baudrillard[1] would say that the abstraction just becomes indistinguishable from what it abstracts. So, the celebrity of art becomes the abstraction for it, and then the abstraction itself becomes art. Eventually another abstraction has to take its place, ad infinitum.
I think I prefer Drew Struzan's definition though. It's something that asks a question, which ultimately only you can answer.
> The definition of "art" becomes "anything produced
> by an Approved Artist," nothing less or more.
Grayson Perry did some very interesting lectures here in the UK where he explained why a urinal in a toilet is a urinal, place it in a gallery as part of a show and it's art.
It's great that the most common question asked of big time artists is "WTF is art anyway?" and they all try to answer it. It's super cool. Anyway Grayson said that all the proper art like portraits and landscapes have been done a million times and are still being made today. It's only the weird shit that gets in the newspapers, and that's because it's weird, or someone paid a gazillion pounds for something bonkers.
Grayson ended up saying that it's an interesting question. There is no answer. He doesn't think about it much.
This is not just true of art but even with businesses that get funded by VCs or that make it into Y Combinator. The latest group dating or photo sharing app might just be another dull piece of crap until it gets validated by the celebrity of VCs or an accelerator.
A baseball in the gift shop for $5 versus identical baseball that happened to be Alex Rodriguez's 500th home run fetching $105,000.
It's not the nature of art, it's purchasing the story around it.
idlewords had a name for this: investor storytime. [1] All these examples have less to do with whether something is or isn't "art" and more about whether the mystique around the story appeals to someone who is willing to part with cash to be part of that a story. A plate with shit is a plate with shit, but a plate of shit with a story? Now you're talking.
Another thought I just had. The original artists of Richard Prince's pieces were understandably upset because it looked like he was profiting unfairly off of their artistic effort--a reasonable assumption, and something that happens all too often with art shared online.
But the truth is actually worse. He didn't profit off of their art, didn't make money because of the quality of their photos. It could have been any photo. It could have been a frame from one of those rotating E-Mail .gifs from the '90s. It doesn't matter, because the only thing Richard Price was ever selling was his own celebrity. The image is merely the frame in which it was hung.
You need to separate the commercial value of art from the (for lack of a better word) intrinsic value of art. The halo effect happens in any field whenever there is a subjective evaluation. For instance, people tend to think expensive wines are better even though they often cannot tell the difference between cheap(er) and more expensive wines in blind tests.
I believe the intrinsic value of art (ie. how "art-y" something is) can be evaluated in a couple ways. First is technical. Does the execution of the art require some kind of technical excellence. If you take a look at some paintings and sculptures, you cannot but be struck by the incredible attention to detail and precise work done by the creator. Even features that the audience would probably never notice (eg. reflections in the pupil of the subject in a painting) are carefully rendered.
The second criteria is how much the piece changes the art form itself. Think about how renaissance paintings introduced perspective in painting to make more realistic images whereas earlier paintings were flat and lifeless. More recently, consider how Elvis created rock and roll or how Michael Jackson changed the definition of a singer from someone with a good voice and catchy tune to being an all round entertainer with skills in dancing, video and special effects.
The third criteria is something I call transference. It is when an artist can transfer an emotion from inside their mind to that of the audience using only the medium of their art. Listen to Chopin's Funeral March to see what I mean or rewatch the early scenes in Jaws (before the shark shows up) to get a more contemporary example.
Lastly, some art has a point of view and says something that asks us to look at the world in a different way. Most standup comedy is like this. Banksy's art is like this. Warhol's paintings were like this. Shit on a plate could be like this if executed well. This is the area where I feel a lot of modern art has lost its way. They mistake different for meaning. I once was at the Tate Modern in London and noticed that most people were not really looking at the works of art but fixated on the little white cards next to each piece explaining what the work was about. If the art work cannot tell its own story then perhaps it has not much to say or is not well done.
Art, like love, can only be truly measured in the heart of the subject. Your feelings for your mum would not be swayed if some celebrity stated that their mother was the best in the world so, unless you are an art investor, do not be carried away by the whims of the so-called connoisseurs of the art establishment.
In Hans Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art, he noted the unexpected commercial success of Dadaist art. The best that I can remember the quote, he said: They expected people to react with shock, and to open their minds. Instead, people reacted with amusement, and opened their wallets.
I disagree
I'm sure some people want his art enough to open their big wallets but that should not detract from others who's minds were actually opened, and whom I believe to be the majority
Actually, an interesting bit of information on the topic of selling Banksy's art. The HBO documentary I mentioned concludes with a statement that while several of NY Residency pieces are up for sale none have sold to date. I don;t know if they have between then and now however.
Anyone interested in Banksy but doesn't know much about him? Check out "Exit Through the Gift Shop". About half way through it turns into the most hilarious documentary I have ever seen.
I think that's exactly why it's a great documentary. I adore Banksy's work and kick myself every day for missing out on the stuff he sold in NY during that stay in NY. I live in CT, a short ride away. Anyway, it's sad but fascinating to see how other people perceive his work, even if it's completely negative and disrespectful.
I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings."
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Everything we make is ephemeral, nothing will last. It will be transformed by man or by nature. Either in its meaning or its form. And, ultimately, it will fall to the elements.
EDIT: I recently learned that there's a second poem, this one by Horace Smith. The two wrote their poems as a competition.
IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
An odd thread for Hacker News, critiques of capitalism, poetry and reflection upon the ephemeral nature of things and - more shocking yet - references to La Planete Sauvage.
I found it rather peculiar that someone started spray-painting over one of his freshly painted works and was wrestled to the ground because of it. [1]
If Banksy's work is meant to raise the question of who in our society gets to determine what images invade everybody's retinas in public spaces [2], those bystanders provided an answer: whoever is hip enough to get people to defend their images. At that point the artwork was complete.
Not a great one for a first day with someone you barely know (no movies at all on a first date, I know, I was young!) or maybe it is great if you want to weed out uninteresting people.
The start is a little slow. I had a friend get board and turn it off before getting to the best part. Maybe you just found someone with a short attention span.
one of the UK papers figured out who he was a few years ago. i know he didnt officially admit it but if you read this article it is pretty clear they actually did track him down (in my opinion anyways)
The point I've taken away from Dismaland is how most theme parks are already Dismaland.
Think of what would make for an awful theme park: high price to enter, long queues everywhere, screaming kids, highly priced low quality food, security checks, a constant push to buy crap.. that's already what we allow to pass as a theme park, yet people willingly sign up to enter.
Interesting to see how well-made some of these pieces are. The overturned horse and the killer whale look very high quality. I wonder how Banksy produces these and maintains his or her anonymity, as the pieces look like they are the work of large teams of professionals.
I think it's been definitely shown he actually has (is?) a large team of professionals, if you watch "exit through the gift shop" you will see the setup for some of the works which uses many different people.
I worked in Bristol between last and this year. Sometime around August maybe last year on a Monday morning, as i was having a work break outside the building, i looked over the corner and a new Bansky was on the wall (girl with the earing). In the afternoon, a wave of admirers was already rolling in. By tuesday, someone had already dafaced the piece, by splashing black ink over some parts of it.
I think that in the end it may not matter; if i had to classify "real" art and was thinking clearly, i'd say "real" art is the message that the piece carries, as the piece itself is just wood, stone, ink or whatever, can be defaced, taken off a wall and sold to a rich guy's living room wall whereas the message is intangible.
So i guess censorship would actually be the worst case.
Ps. This line of thought relates to some of the other comments in these threads ("... [T]here's no protesting capitalism. There's nothing you can say about capitalism that it won't subsume and sell back to you." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10093768)
Things really are getting worse for most people now. Something that maybe we aren't used to as technologists in our little bubbles away from the rest of the economy.
Dismaland is not even satire, it's a reflection of what is really happening as the rich try to prop up a system that looks like its about to fail again... buy gold and bitcoin.
I'm no art critic, but I suspect Disneylands commercialism is not the target of the commentary at all (more likely the direction of modern society or 21st century Britain or something like that), it is just the physical manifestation or visual theme of that commentary.
A bit like how the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man is not really a deity, but the physical manifestation of Gozer the Gozerian. You miss the point somewhat if you concentrate on the marshmellow.
Definitely redundant. But to be fair if marketing/advertising/campaigning bludgeons the point home (Eat such and such fast food and have a happy relationship with your children! Buy such and such clothes and have a sexy girlfriend! Have you absorbed this political talking point yet!?) it's only fair that people speaking against that are allowed the same license to labour the point to the edge of boredom and despair.
Bob Iger of Disney this week has said, that they are at a point with their content/merch/theme parks etc able to "burn out" the entire consuming population of the country if they wanted too...
Imagine what that overoptimized machine can do in a few years from now.
