Banksy’s street art residency in New York ended dramatically on October 31st, with the $615,000 sale of an originally-fifty-dollar oil painting, altered by Banksy himself. Though the benefits of the sale ultimately went to charity, the auction draws attention to Banksy’s social standing in the art-world, and its impact on the perceived value of his art. It offers an entry point to explore Banksy’s contentious involvement with the conflicting realms of “outside art” and “inside art”.
Banksy artistically infiltrated the five boroughs of New York this October, creating new pieces of artwork each day for his street show “Better Out Than In.” The works ranged from his classic stencil-spray paintings to sculptures, moveable pieces, and even performance pieces. Banksy’s work defies traditional categories and can be characterized as guerrilla art, stencil-street paintings that resist centralized authority, warfare and an exploitative capitalist system with irony and paint. Displayed on the streets, his work challenges the exclusivity and elitism of museums by putting art where everyone is free to view it.
After finishing each piece, Banksy put a photo of it up on his website, along with the approximate location of the work, thus provoking a scramble amongst his fans, frantically trying to find his work before it was removed or “defaced.” The result was that his works mostly targeted a specific audience, one that regularly checked his blog and had the means and will to travel to view his work. In this sense, his residency almost looked like a huge advertising coup orchestrated by a PR team, with the mysterious aura of his anonymity being used to generate even more of a stir within both the media and public. The mostly-white middle-class audience generated anger among residents in Brooklyn who declared that no one cared for their neighborhood until someone introduced something that outsiders deemed worth seeing. In sharp contrast to the very nature of street art, many locals viewed Banksy’s work as being catered for one exclusive group, transforming rather than subverting the elitism of the museum.
The reactions of residents and street artists to Banksy’s works created a scandal in the media. Banksy’s admirers were outraged with what they regarded to be “vandalization” of his pieces, and this seems to corroborate with the exclusivity of his audience. Many street artists and graffiti artists were frustrated because they felt Bansky was not “playing by the rules” of the street by painting on other people’s ‘turfs’ and painting over people’s works. It is exactly this ephemeral characteristic of street art that makes it so distinctive from the endurance of traditional forms of art. Street art is almost entirely dependent on its site specificity and the context surrounding it, and for this reason people cannot expect it to remain untouched. The immutability, and resulting sterility of art found in museums is in fact exactly the institution that Banksy is rebelling against. Other graffiti artists are seen as vandals when they are essentially doing the same thing as Banksy. Banksy’s work and the reactions surrounding it draw attention to the fact that we have deemed one mark on the wall to be more valuable than another one - perhaps because the authorities in the art market tell us so.
In light of this, we must view Banksy’s residency as a whole and not just in terms of the individual pieces. His works in themselves are art, as are the reactions of the people who encounter them. Though his residency is contested, when viewed as a whole I think we can deem it to be a successful work of street art. After a few exhibitions, Banksy vehemently returned his art to the streets, where he hoped it would “act as a public service, provoke debate, voice concerns, forge identities,” and that’s exactly what it did.
In his subtle performance piece, Banksy gave a few original signed pieces (worth about $ 200 each) to a street vendor who sold each for a mere $60. The outrageous discount, an unprecidented move in the artworld, spurred much discussion among fans and critiques. Banksy, in fact, made a subtle mockery of those who buy and auction his work, demonstrating the shallow aristocratic value of art by the same stroke. His art has definitely not lost its subversive political message. With his humorous and slightly self-deprecating online audio guide, Banksy made it clear that the pretentiousness so commonly associated to artists in the art world has yet to infect him.
Banksy seems to be an artist caught between both the art market world and the world of the street, struggling to remain true to his “street values” as the art market scrambles to extract money from him. In this light, the New York residency seemed almost to be a huge prank, where Banksy called attention to the ridiculousness of his status and power in the art world by manipulating herds of people and making them run from one place to the next in order to catch a fleeting glimpse of some paint on a wall. It was his way of uttering a mischievous “fuck you” to the exclusive world of “inside art,” mocking their attempts to tame him and appropriate work that, by its very nature, is a common good. On his last audio recording, Banky makes this explicit, proudly claiming that “Outside is where art should live, amongst us”.
WRITTEN BY MAXINE DONNATT
PHOTOS FROM BANKSYNY.COM & NYDAILYNEWS.COM
