The Story of Banksy

Wikipedia tells us that Banksy “is an anonymous England -based street artist, vandal, political activist, and film dirExit Visual Builderector.” He was in the news recently as many of you know. His “Balloon Girl” self-destructed after it was sold at Sotheby’s. Banksy cleverly installed a shredder into the frame of the print and when the print was sold, the shredder was mysteriously turned on and half the print was shredded before it stopped.

There is much to say about Banksy. Suffice it to say, in this brief blog, that Banksy follows in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp.[1] In both cases, their critiques of the art world and larger society please ruling class types more than they wound them for the simple reason that in both cases their efforts at critique provide wealthy speculators with even more lucrative vehicles for speculation. Take the self-destructing Balloon Girl: one auction expert believes that the altered Balloon Girl will “only propel this further and, given the media attention this stunt has received, the lucky buyer would see a great return on the $1.4m they paid last night. This is now part of art history in its shredded state and we’d estimate Banksy has added at a minimum 50% to its value, possibly as high as being worth $2.6m plus.”

The Story of Peter

When I was 18, at least for a time, I didn’t think that the approach to painting taught to me by Bill Schultz was sufficiently hip. I wanted to do something overtly cool. Then one day when I was visiting Schultz’s studio, I stood before a simple painting of a house on a street. In a way that I can only describe as mysterious, I was moved. The feeling I experienced was telling. I could remember how in the past when I stood before Schultz’s paintings I would be moved, but remembering that I had those feelings was totally different than actually having them in the present, being in the feeling so to speak. That did it. This was plenty cool enough for me. I wanted to do that.

Anyway, I recalled these thoughts when I heard an interview with Irwin Redlener, an American pediatrician who specializes in health care for under served children who found themselves in “extreme adversity.” What caught my attention was a story about a young boy named Peter:

He’s disheveled, his clothes were a wreck, he was looking down at the floor, and like so many children, he’s been traumatized for a long time, not particularly communicative. So I asked him, Peter, what do you want to be when you grow up and I was startled because he said, “ I want to be a paleontologist,” – perfectly pronounced, clear as a bell. And I said, what is that? And he said, “somebody who looks for dinosaur bones.” I said, that’s really fantastic, how do you know about that? And he takes out a yellow, old article from the NYT that somebody had given to him a year before about a dinosaur hunter working out west. And several things happened to me, my reactions were multilayered, one of which was, what an extraordinary thing for a kid like this to say. Secondly, here is a kid in adversity who is carrying around what in essence is a lifeline to a very productive and interesting future. But the third thing that was so powerful to me was an instant understanding that this child’s chances of becoming a paleontologist were essentially nil. And all I could think about were my own children who all they had to do was to say they wanted to become paleontologists, study in school, go to college and that was that. There was a trajectory for them and there was no trajectory for this kid, Peter.

So fast forward 25 years later. I’m speaking to a friend of mine who runs a big anti-hunger program for poor children. I told him about the story of this kid Peter who wanted to be a paleontologist. So he tells me about his own 9-year old son who wants to be a paleontologist. He and his wife got their child every book on the subject appropriate for his age, had taken him to see museums. More dramatically, they had called this same paleontologist out in the west, made arrangements to meet with him, flew their son out with them to go visit with him. The disparity between the potential opportunity for my friend’s kid was like a different universe from what poor children have for prospects for the future.

What jumped out at me was the concept of lifeline. We live in a time when, institutionally, it feels like the wheels are falling off. With regard to party politics, as you know, very serious battle lines are being drawn. Each side believes that the other side is unhinged. The wheels aren’t coming off in the art world, though, because they have already fallen off decades ago.

In the art world, traditional art must be dismissed out of hand by the high-end types. And why? Because high-end speculators have zero authority when it comes to exploiting color, or painterly bravura, or the understanding of nature as source, or the novel use of paint to achieve startling effects of light. Our practices could possibly subvert the authority associated with the hegemonic practices that turn on shock, cleverness, and succès de scandale. Or to put it more simply, what makes Balloon Girl, let alone Shredded Balloon Girl important is that they provide speculators both with authority and opportunity.

So here’s my point. We are like Peter. We unfashionable easel painters live in art world adversity. And you know those methods that you studied, paid for, and worked hard to master? Those methods which allow you “to feel larger, more powerful, more beautiful” (to quote Emma Goldman)? They are like young Peter’s yellow, old article from the NYT. They are lifelines in a world that is moving with a tortured tension, to paraphrase Nietzsche, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river as toward catastrophe.

[1] Duchamp, who confessed to being bored with art, gained notoriety by exhibiting a urinal (“Fountain”) in 1917 in order to “mock” the art world. He rode succès de scandale to fame and enormous influence and is now recognized by many as perhaps the pivotal figure in visual art in the 20^th century.