Context is everything.
Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
21–30 of 98 posts
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#22I would like to know where this $750K number is coming from. Generally Banksy originals of this kind are priced closer to low five-figures, but if someone has inside knowledge here please share. This article puts the value at around 20K pounds: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/banksy-sells-origina...
Could this price be the estimated value for all of the pieces put together?
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#23surprised so few stopped. $60 for a canvas knockoff of banksy isnt a bad price, let alone an original.
Totally agree - just the size of some of the pieces alone and the fact they are on canvas. $60 seems like a great price.
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#24surprised so few stopped. $60 for a canvas knockoff of banksy isnt a bad price, let alone an original.
98% of people have no clue who Banksy is, certainly in the US.
I had no idea who he was until Colbert decided to make him part of his schtick last week.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/42957...
Like most things, just getting people to talk about him will raise his profile. Being mentioned on national TV and the network news doesn't hurt either.
That said, I must confess my ignorance as I'm unaware of why Banksy is relevant. I don't mean high level ignorance, as I have googled around and I get the general idea of his works and some of the social issues his works relate to. What I mean is I'm unaware of how he became relevant in pop culture. Does anyone here know?
Banksy's wikipedia article[1] doesn't particularly spell it out. Did his first works show up in a particularly public area in response to a poignant event and the British media noticed it? Did his work catch on organically?
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy#Early_career_.281992.E2....
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#25I think, and I am not an expert by far, that this just shows what the market value of those art pieces are when removed from their context. You won't pay more than $30-60 for it unless you are told otherwise by someone of authority - an art critic or a market of affluent and competing buyers motivated by various reasons. There is also the fact that he did it in NY, where $60 is acceptable to many buyers. The sales would have been diffirent in rural Alabama or New Delhi.
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
and that's the art.
Well, also...he's messing with the people who value his stuff at ridiculous prices, but can't pick it out of a lineup. This is great not because it was anonymous (that was just a requirement -- if it weren't, he'd have been swamped by idiots), but because it illustrates the fundamental absurdity of the art "scene". It's a nice bit of mockery.
If you listen to his audio commentaries (most of his pieces in http://www.banksyny.com/ have a commentary on the page), he pokes fun at himself and at pretentious commentaries that often accompany art pieces.
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#27It's interesting to compare this to the Joshua Bell (live) 'performance' cited in @mjn's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544810) considering that Banksy generally makes stencil art. I suppose the performance here was not about the art products at all.
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
98% of people have no clue who Banksy is, certainly in the US.
This is by no means a quantitative study, but I live in the U.S. (in a fly-over state, none the less), have very little connection to the arts and every friend I can think of, off the top of my head, knows who banksy is. It's obviously a pretty self-selected population, and I mean, I haven't formally surveyed all of my friends, but there you have it, for what it's worth.
I like Banksy, but there's no way my mom knows who he is, which is the important thing. There are more "my moms" in the U.S. than there are "your friends", in other words.
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
98% of people have no clue who Banksy is, certainly in the US.
I had no idea who he was until Colbert decided to make him part of his schtick last week. http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/42957... Like most things, just getting people to talk about him will raise his profile. Being mentioned on national TV and the network news doesn't hurt either. That said, I must confess my ignorance as I'm unaware of why Banksy is relevant. I don't mean high level ignoranc…
The closest touchstone might be to think about Andy Warhol.
Re: Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]
#30I probably wouldn't have bought anything, and instead assumed that the guy was selling ripoffs.