Banksy: Girl with Balloon (London, 2002)
(Note the chalked message on the wall; if that doesn't make you want to
vomit, pop the balloon and shoot the artist, I don't know what would.)
I.
There's a rather poignant moment in his interview with the Sex Pistols when Bill Grundy mourns the passing of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms. Classical composers mocked by Rotten as wonderful people whom, as Steve Jones reminds us, are long since dead [1].
It's as if Grundy realises that his time too is over and that the world he knows and loves - in which the majority shared his values and musical preferences - is coming to an end.
Strangely, I felt something similar when I recently discovered that Britain's favourite artwork (according to a poll of 2,000 people conducted in 2017) is Girl with Balloon (2002) by Banksy ...
Turner, Constable, Blake and Bacon have all died and no longer turn anybody on it seems, apart from a few old farts, myself included, and it's just our tough shit if tastes have changed and people now want banal (because immediately accessible) images and naive political clichés - which, let's be honest, is mostly what Banksy trades in - instead of complex, challenging works.
II.
Now, just to be clear, I've nothing against a former public school boy making millions from the art world with his (sometimes amusing) stencilled designs whilst posing as part cultural prankster, part urban guerilla. And if people want to regard him as a folk hero and put his prints on their walls, that's fine by me.
But, having said that, I do tend to agree with Alexander Adams, who argues that when one compares Banksy with, for example, Jean-Michel Basquiat - "another artist who started in the streets
and moved to art galleries" - we soon discover the former's limitations:
"Basquiat's art is alive because we see the artist changing his mind,
discovering, adapting and revising. We see the art as it is being made.
While Basquiat's art is palpably alive, Banksy's is dead - it is simply
the transcription of a witty pre-designed image in a novel placement.
There is no ambiguity or doubt, no possibility of misinterpretation.
There's no fire and no excitement." [2]
Ultimately, concludes Adams - himself an artist, as well as a critic and poet - "Basquiat's art is so much richer and more inventive than
Banksy's, which by contrast seems painfully limited and shallow" [3].
I'm not sure I agree, however, that a century from now people will still be viewing Basquiat and will have forgotten Banksy. And, as regular readers of Torpedo the Ark might appreciate, I have a lot of problems with several of the terms used here:
"Banksy lacks most of the characteristics of a serious artist:
originality, complexity, universality, ambiguity, depth and insight into
human nature and the world generally." [4]
Indeed, reading this almost makes me want to embrace Banksy and tell Adams to keep his opinions to himself.
One also wonders if Adams isn't just a tad jealous of an artist who, like Damien Hirst, has achieved such astonishing fame and fortune (speaking personally, I know that I would love to wield even a fraction of Banksy's influence over the popular imagination and envy both his talent for graphic design and flair for self-promotion).
But, then, just when I'm starting to feel a certain fondness and admiration for Banksy, I think again of the above image and its message of hope and realise that Adams is right to ultimately brand him nothing but a "cosy culture warrior and peddler of pedestrian homilies" [5].
Notes
[1] Bill Grundy's infamous interview with the Sex Pistols on the Today programme took place on 1 December, 1976: click here to relive the moment on YouTube - one which is as significant and as memorable for those of the punk generation as the Kennedy assassination was for those who witnessed events in Dallas on 22 November, 1963.
[2] Alexander Adams, 'Banksy and the triumph of banality', essay in The Critic (Jan 2020): click here to read online. Adams is quoting here from an earlier article of his which appeared on the Spiked website comparing Banksy and Basquiat.
[3-5] Ibid.
