I recall walking through a street of San Francisco (though I can't remember which one - maybe the Haight somewhere) when I saw a big spray-painted piece of art on a wall above the top of a building. I instantly recognized it as being in the style of Banksy. I doubted it at the time because I'm a London expat and it seemed too much of a coincidence to have your "local" artist suddenly turn up in your new neighborhood.
It was only later I looked it up online and found it was actually his work. I'm actually a little surprised that stall at Central Park didn't at least get a few people questioning who the artist was. Perhaps they did, but for brevity the video doesn't show those interactions, because they didn't end up buying anything.
The pieces he sold here look intentionally mediocre. They're just reproductions using stencils he used a while ago on actual buildings. They look much better in their original context. Here they look flat and boring.
Banksy actually does some interesting stuff with paintings (http://imgur.com/S3CTKip) that's better than just using his old stencils on white canvases. My guess is he wanted these canvases to look like someone did the bare minimum to copy his most iconic stencils and make money off of Banksy's fame.
That said I would have liked to have bought one even if the real art is the entire performance and not the individual canvases being sold.
I think you're right - these look exactly like the Banksy 'reproductions' that are sold in high street poster stores up and down the UK. Most of them looked like a 30 second version of stencils / originals / prints that were released a long time ago.
I think that most people who knew who Banksy was prior to this probably would have looked, laughed and walked on. As for the guy who bought 4 of them for the walls of his new house - he can probably pay off a fair whack of his mortgage!
Over the last few years I'd imagine Banksy's made a fair few unsuspecting people a significant chunk of change... Good on him :-)
Very rarely is a picture or painting interesting just by looking at it, but the story behind an image is much harder to sell on the street. As to "people don't recognize art when they see it" type of posts, there are plenty of Banksys out there you've never heard of. In addition to that, what would the appropriate reaction have been according to the poster? People fast-food shopping art at a street corner, like that's any better?
Reminds me of that time when Joshua Bell played in a subway with an incredibly expensive violin. They showed people just walking past, not knowing at all what they're missing. When I saw that I thought, "what the hell is he trying to prove?"
You always need to adapt your art to the medium and provide contrast. To do otherwise is to argue against reality. Your average run-of-the-mill street performer is always going to get more attention than Joshua Bell will on the street.
Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post set this up and wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning article about it. It's a great article, "Pearls Before Breakfast":
Try not to let this article turn you off Weingarten's work — I think this story was meant to be a bit "fun".
For something more serious, check out Weingarten's thought-provoking feature piece about dead children — "Fatal Distraction", http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-03-08/news/36840402_... . His story does a good job of (1) telling stories about tragic accidents where children were forgotten in the back of cars and died; (2) showing that the key factor in whether or not the parents were prosecuted was not the facts of the situation but instead which prosecutor's district the deaths occurred in; (3) finding a surprising explanation for the increase in these accidents — rear-facing car seats. Given the subject matter, it's neither smug nor glib, and so you might prefer it to his subway violin story.
At least give the author the benefit of the doubt. I've never lived anywhere near Washington D.C. but a quick search reveals the station is anything but "plebeian":
Did you read the article? Is the smug tone some kind of joke that I'm not getting? Because based on my own reading the author really does judge the commuters for not stopping, and the use of "plebeian" was not in jest.
I think you're going out of your way to sound sophisticated by pretending you "get it".
I thought the real lesson of that episode was "most people on the DC metro in the early morning hours are probably commuters in a bit of a rush to get to work on time." Perhaps an evening concert in the same venue would have been more productive...
The famous violinist Joshua Bell once played in a DC metro station for nearly an hour. He played six Bach pieces (some of the hardest ever composed) on a $3.5MM violin. Over a thousand people rushed by, unperturbed. He made $32 and some change.
I still don't know how this makes me feel. You can say it's human to ignore things on the street, but there were more children who stopped than adults.
I think it's moreso that the older we get, the less we trust our emotions. We're scared to have an original opinion, or go against the grain. We let the responsibilities of life take over-- it's easier than reflecting on who you are and how things feel. We don't want to get in trouble, don't want to be late for work, don't want people to laugh at us, don't want to feel alone.
I wish I knew how to fix this in the world. I think we're missing out on a lot.
This is a great piece of writing, but before you take too much of a lesson in human nature realize this was also in a commuter station at 8am on a work day. Even if people had wanted to stop, they had somewhere to be.
I've seen musicians on the level of a talented high schooler draw a big crowd and rake in cash at chinatown a few stops away. If Bell had done that experiment in Dupont Circle at 6pm on a Saturday night he'd have probably started a riot =).
I think your assessment that grown-ups ignore fascinating things, because we have a filter that only lets us see the mundane, is spot on. This is probably unfixable. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, he gives this phenomenon a straightforward personification — whenever the character Death enter the real world, he gets lots of attention from children and cats, but is invisible to grown-ups.
I've often seen people say that one of the great things about having kids is getting an opportunity to see the world through their "everything is interesting" perspective. So there's an option…
BTW, my favorite part about Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer Prize-winning Joshua Bell subway busking experiment is that after he won the prize, someone noticed that this experiment had also been performed in 1930 with similar results — see http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-06-29/opinions/36873... .
In the context of a street performance, the difference between a bad musician and a good musician is much greater than that between a good and a world-class one, particularly if you're only briefly exposed to it. For the most part, you're just not focusing on the music - it's not like sitting in a hall intending to be entertained.
Should people at a metro station even be able to tell the difference between a violin worth $3.5k and one worth $3.5M anyway?
Another conclusion you could draw is that when you remove the hype Banksy's work just isn't very compelling (anymore, or perhaps just on canvas). Or perhaps this is evidence of the opposite: a fair number of people were willing to pay $60 for a small monochrome, hastily-sprayed stencil piece.
When it comes to street art/graffiti, the context is just as, if not more, important than the art itself. For example, massive roller paintings on the sides of buildings or pieces on trains are interesting partially because of the danger involved in putting up the work in the first place. When the context is removed and it's just put on a piece of canvas, it loses a lot of its significance. It's a similar reason why some feel that paid murals aren't true graff since then it's not really street art, it's just art on the street.
This. part pf street art is the 'vandalism' aspect. in banksy's case there is almost always an ironic play on this. in others, we've seen thinkgs in the uk like using "powerwashers" to do grafitii, as a relief of light (clean) against normal (dirty). oh, and this selective washing was "illegal", and deemed "vandalism" even though by most sane standards washing a wall (however selective) would seem in the public interest. But the marking of the wall (claiming it as your own) is the inherent social transgression...sad statement on our modern world. Yes, and none of this gets communicated with the same techniques ex-situ.
In this case, not sad at all. As abat says above, these pieces look flat and boring. Usually Banksy's work melds with the environment it's in, often in clever ways. Taken out of that environment, it's just stencil art. The special essence has left, and it does become boring.
Probably meant ironic because of the nature of the specific art piece: a man pasting a "Cancelled" sign over some fake graffiti that says "Follow your dreams"
The guy shown is too old to be Banksy, but I wouldn't be that surprised if it were him in makeup ala Johnny Knoxville when he gets made up as Irving Zisman. The "old man" mannerisms were laid on pretty thick.
Banksy is just the remainder of an unbalanced equation in the matrix. Marketing has triumphed over Art. The rebel artist is an anomaly, but it is not unexpected. Which has led you, inexorably, here.
It was only later I looked it up online and found it was actually his work. I'm actually a little surprised that stall at Central Park didn't at least get a few people questioning who the artist was. Perhaps they did, but for brevity the video doesn't show those interactions, because they didn't end up buying anything.