Mmale police officers kissing each other, a girl climbing the wall between Israel and Palestine with a helium balloon, reindeer with a sled guarding the sleeping place of a homeless person on a bridge: striking political kitsch or easily accessible art for everyone? Opinions are divided on the globally active street art phantom Banksy. The critics of the supposed “outlaw” from Bristol cannot warm to his stencil-sprayed images and consider his inventiveness to be overrated.
Even when Banksy builds a self-destruct mechanism into a work that just switches on during its auction at Sotheby’s. That’s not original, they say, the artist Gustav Metzger wrote the “Manifesto of Autodestructive Art” back in 1960 and thus created his own art movement. And then there was Jean Tinguely, who in the same year set up a machine in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art entitled “Hommage to New York”, which burst into flames without human intervention.
A defense from the first page
The great unknown, who refuses to reveal his identity, believes these objections are elitist gatekeeping and takes a stance on anything and everything, be it Brexit, the art market or the medical staff working in intensive care units for Covid patients. In March, a painting on the subject fetched £16.8 million at auction at Christie’s. Banksy donated the money to the National Health Service (NHS). Did that benefit his credibility, or does it really highlight the art market winner?
Carol Diehl, American painter and art critic, leaves no doubt as to how she feels about Banksy. Your book is designed as a defense from the first page. Right in the introduction she states that for her “Banksy is one of the greatest geniuses of our time”, “a torchbearer worthy of Marcel Duchamp” who forces us to reconsider what art is. She accuses any art critic who disagrees of a snobbish defensiveness towards artists who succeed with large audiences. As a painter, she was inspired by street artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat back in the 1980s. Since she was rejected by the Art Institute of Chicago, she attended evening courses and first entered the art scene without the dubious “shaping of art education” in order to then write for the renowned art magazine Artforum.
Apparently, the author thinks that, because of her own career, she has a more credible approach to Banksy’s concept of art than most of her colleagues who have university degrees. Listing their assessments takes up considerable space, from “entertainment for teenagers” to “an art for all who hate the Turner Prize”; the named critics just wouldn’t do their homework if an artist wasn’t part of the system and came from a major gallery like Gagosian.
Torn between positions
The aggressive tone runs through the whole book. In addition to the constant friction caused by the rejection of the artist she admires, garnished with anti-capitalist statements, Diehl does manage to weave a network of relationships and references, which she presents using the example of individual works.
It also provides information about which pictures can still be seen at the original location, which have been destroyed or removed and sold. Even if you don’t necessarily want to know what she felt when she visited the satirical art project “Dismaland” in England or the follow-up work “The Walled Off Hotel” in Bethlehem, the classifications in the respective social context are worth reading. She is also forgiven for some redundancies, for example when she repeatedly emphasizes how important the selection of locations is, the surprise effect or Banksy’s messages in social media, which revolve around topics such as surveillance, digitization, terrorism, climate and migration crises. One can read Diehl’s text as an update on the debates about Banksy. And may catch himself being torn between positions.
Carol Diehl: “Banksy: Completed”. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2021. 216 pp., ill., hardcover, €25.99.
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