The mystique of Banksy’s art
MIAMI – If you've ever wondered how the other half lives, pay a visit to Miami Art Week. Like swallows returning to Capistrano, the beautiful people make their way here each December for a few days of Chardonnay sipping and paparazzi posing.
Besides that, there’s some pretty cool art, too.
The real star of this year's show – at least judging from the security arrangements – isn't Cindy Crawford or the other celebrities milling about. It's a 6,000-pound slab of concrete and brick attributed to the graffiti artist Banksy.
“Banksy is a very well-known British street artist,” said Chris Arnold of the Keszler Gallery. “He started out with small street pieces in Europe, and he's become very hot. And in eight years, he went from a few hundred pounds to selling a 1.8-million piece at Sotheby's.”
In this case, that's pounds, as in British money.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Banksy made a name for himself as the l’enfant terrible of the British underground art world. In a 2003 exhibition, Banksy painted live animals, prompting one animal rights activist to chain herself to a railing. In 2004, he made spoof £10 notes with Princess Diana’s face, and threw them into a London crowd. He’s painted nine images on the Israeli West Bank wall, and in 2006, painted another live animal – this time an elephant – which stood in the center of his exhibition, decorated like pink and gold wallpaper, to allegedly draw attention to world poverty.
Dark humor and subtle subversion are Banksy’s trademarks. And capitalism, greed, poverty and imperialism are his regular targets. "We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles,” he wrote in his book Wall and Piece. “In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves."
So there is something darkly humorous, subtly subversive or straight up ironic in the fact that Banksy is now the darling of the well-heeled art world, his works selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“It used to be all the works were destroyed immediately,” Arnold said. “But people are catching on, ‘Hey, we got something here.’"
A weighty medium
A big part of the Banksy mystique is that you never know where he'll turn up. In cities across the globe, he has left a trail of graffiti art, usually done under cover of darkness. Banksy never photographs or reproduces the work. His works are one-of-kind and fixed in the public spaces that Banksy chooses to bless. Months ago, Banksy popped up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook.
His simple image of a heart-shaped balloon became an overnight sensation. People lined up around the block for a moment of communion. It was a sudden, unexpected gift to the community, and for the owner of the building, a winning lottery ticket. Almost as quickly as the balloon work appeared, it vanished. Enter Chris Arnold and his gallery.
“To move a canvas, you need some bubble wrap and a car,” he said. “To move a piece of street art, you first have to drill 25 holes around it, put steel bars around it, then you have to support the ceiling, put a metal frame around it, get all kinds of forklifts, put it on a truck without the truck breaking down, take it down the road and put it in an art show. I didn't sleep for three days until this got here!”
It's estimated that “Bandage Heart” will fetch several hundred thousand dollars. Arnold brought the work to Miami to drum up interest, and his plan seems to be working.
“I think it is amazing,” said one patron at Miami Art Week. “And it is something that is proof that art is everywhere.”
Another called Banksy a genius.
“For some reason, this resonates with me because it seems to reflect on the daily struggles we all kind of have in our own way,” a third visitor said.
Chris Arnold
Keszler Gallery
Back in Brooklyn
Of course, we wouldn't be doing our journalistic duty if we didn't bring you the other side of the story. So we sent America Tonight producer Sopan Deb back to Red Hook – a place where one doesn't meet many supermodels. Soon, Sopan and crew found where the Banksy once stood.
“I don't think they should have removed it,” one resident told Sopan. “I think they should have just left it there.”
Another man summed up the sentiment in Brooklyn best: “It sucks.”
Red Hook has become an arts destination of its own. Once blue collar, these days it's more "blue-collar chic." Walk these streets, and you'll see all kinds of murals. It's just that people here have different ideas than those in Miami about what constitutes art.
“I think the thing with people who buy pieces of street art like this are the same as people who buy fancy cars and they don't know how to drive them,” one woman said. “They just don't get it.”
In Red Hook, there was one guy who wasn't that impressed by Bansky. His name is Michael Angelo – seriously.
“It wasn't really that big a commotion for me,” Angelo said, shrugging.
When you're Michael Angelo, it's probably hard to get excited about a piece of graffiti.
Banksy’s process and PR
Arnold doesn’t believe he’s violating the spirit of Banksy’s work by ripping it from the wall. In fact, he thinks it was Banksy’s intention. Banksy’s a savvy guy, he says, and knew that balloon in Brooklyn would be quickly discovered and removed.
“In anticipation of the New York auctions in November, he came to New York and spent the month of October creating street pieces,” Arnold said. “Crazy gallery people like us take it down and show it; he gets all this PR. His ‘official’ pieces have a spike in value from the PR. It's the process of the publicity behind a series of street works that drives his auction prices up.”
Besides creating street art, Arnold notes, Bansky also sells officially sanctioned pieces at auction.
Has the street artist abandoned the principles of his craft? Should public art be torn from the open air and placed behind glass? If Banksy graced your building, would you remove the wall and sell it for half a million? Perhaps if people paused from asking these questions for a moment, and listened hard enough, they would hear Banksy laughing all the way to the bank.
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