The Most Public of Art

Right now, there is a truck in Gaza just waiting.  Full of tools, a generator, flood lights, saw horses and the ubiquitous yellow construction tape to block off a street, the vehicle is gassed up and ready to go on a moment’s notice.

It is not a rescue truck, per se:  this is a different kind of first response vehicle.   Sometime in the next few months, a shadowy, unknown person will furtively act in the middle of the night—an event that will send this truck and eager men to the scene as fast as possible.

Fortunately, this has nothing to with exploding bombs or acts of terrorism.  The men racing to an as yet unknown scene, are hoping to be among the first to arrive after a new piece of street art created by secretive street artist, Banksy who frequently, and clandestinely, puts up new work near the wall separating Jerusalem from Palestine.  These are not “art lovers” who race to the scene, but men hoping to remove the artwork—sometimes along with the wall it was stenciled on—for money.  There are galleries that have paid in six figures for a Banksy original and since the anonymous artist can hardly claim ownership, it is frequently a case of finders, keepers.

I really like Banksy.  Though our politics differ a little, I appreciate his humor, his use of satire to make his point, and even the way he ridicules the art world.

Banksy has certainly established a cultural and artistic identity, despite his being an anonymous artist.  (Well, mostly anonymous:  In an age of omnipresent video cameras—especially in his home country of England—it is impossible to remain anonymous for long.  A few minutes with Google and you can find out about Banksy’s life, his wife, and his politics, and you can view videos of him working.)

I’m not sure that merely saying Banksy has a cultural identity does him justice:   He is a cultural icon with a vast public following on multiple public media sites.  When a new work is revealed, people rush from all over the world to view his latest creation.  There is a thriving market in his works (both authorized and pirated).  There is even a public debate on whether being selected as a site for his work is a blessing or a curse, considering the increased traffic and media attention each work generates. 

Banksy first started doing satirical street art in the Bristol area, where he switched to using stencils after being chased by the local police.  He claims to have gotten the idea from the stenciled serial number of the garbage truck he was hiding under.  His work is frequently anti-war, pro-Palestinian, anti-capital, or just generally anti-establishment.  His anti-capital work may be some of his best satire, since the artist has used an agent to sell his work since 2002.  Some art magazines have estimated that his annual income is approximately $20 million.

From 2004 to 2006, Banksy produced hundreds of counterfeit £10 notes, issued by the “Banksy of England”, with the likeness of Princess Diana replacing the likeness of Queen Elizabeth.  Wads of the bills were simply thrown into crowds at sporting events or street carnivals.  While the naive tried to spend them in stores, the more astute sold them on Ebay for much more than face value.  Fake copies of the counterfeit bills sell for about $20, but an original Banksy counterfeit now sells for $700.  In 2015, Banksy “issued” similar £20 notes at his Dismaland installation, a fake version of Disneyland that was sort of a cross between a poor county fair and a nightmare by Stephen King.

In 2006, Banksy created Well Hung Lover (right) on the side of a sexual health clinic in Bristol.  Besides the obvious humor in both the piece and its location, the work is important for helping to establish Banksy’s position as a ‘legitimate’ street artist.  While the city of Bristol was engaged in a public war against graffiti at the time, public support for the piece was so strong that the city reversed itself, granting retroactive permission for the work (the first legal street art mural in English history).

And, of course, I have to include the framed painting of Balloon Girl from 2018.  A stenciled work, inside a frame made by the artist, within seconds of being sold at Sotheby’s Auction House for £1.04 million, a shredder mounted inside the frame began destroying the bottom third of the painting.  Simultaneously, Banksy’s Instagram account signaled, “Going, going, gone.”  Banksy has since revealed that the original intention was to completely destroy the work and that the mechanism’s stopping was an unexplained malfunction.

Banksy intended to make a statement about the commercialization of art and its transitory existence.  He later misquoted it as Picasso’s (it was actually Bakunin’s originally), “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”  Obviously, Banksy was correct since papers around the world heralded his newest triumph, while the greatest prank in art history resulted in effectively doubling the market price of the work for the new owner.  Not to be outdone, Sotheby’s now claims that it was the first time in history that a major work of art was created during an auction.  The satire continues, the work has since been retitled Love is In the Bin.

Banksy is in the news right now because of his latest work, created back in his home base of England.  A ten-meter square drawing of a child playing with an action figure of a caped nurse (his having discarded similar figures of Batman and Superman back to the toy box), was found hanging on a hospital wall in Southampton.  Simultaneously, on one of Banksy’s recognized social media accounts, a message appeared: “Thanks for all you're doing. I hope this brightens the place up a bit, even if it's only black and white."  Someday soon, the hospital should be able to auction off the piece for millions.

Like I said, I like Banksy.

There is a problem, however:  Banksy is glorifying “street art” (which is just a glorified way of saying, “graffiti”).   Most of the famous street artists—Banksy, Basquiat, David Choe, and Lee Quiñones—all got their starts by doing the kind of graffiti that someone else has to remove with turpentine and elbow grease.   Basquiat allegedly got his start tagging the A train in New York City.  This year alone, the New York City Transit Authority has budgeted over $600,000 for graffiti removal from railroad cars.

At its most common level, street art is vandalism against private and public property.  This year alone, various government agencies will spend in total $15 billion to remove public graffiti.  That is more funding than the National Endowment for the Arts has received since its inception, with enough left over to fund the organization for the next fifty years.  The cost of graffiti removal by the private sector is many times that amount. 

The world is full of starving (well, at least hungry) young artists who firmly believe it’s the government’s duty to support their art with grants—too bad that much of the funding is going to clean up graffiti, instead.

In terms of dollar expenditures, the single most impressive amounts by which our society “supports the arts” is not in grants to our museums, or to NPR, or to the NEA...And it’s not in money given to Big Bird, or to Minnesota Public Radio:  It is in cleaning up after young vandals with cans of spray paint.  Unfortunately, none of them, so far, has demonstrated the kind of talent needed to succeed Banksy.