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Central Park (Banksy)

banksyny.com

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Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#21

Post by jberryman »

Zoepfli wrote: post #16
norswap wrote: post #14

I love that I get the feeling there is a message that wants to get out of the experiment, but that it isn't explicitly stated.

Yes, and that message is "art is as much about the object itself as it is about its sociological context." Put something into a museum and everybody will look at it reverently. Sell it on the street and most will ignore it. Sad. But human.

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.

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#22

Post by Rimpinths »

vinceguidry wrote: post #9
quchen wrote: post #3

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'…

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 t…

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":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#23

Post by iamben »

abat wrote: post #10
pslam wrote: post #4

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.…

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…

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 :-)

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#24

Post by nrivadeneira »

jberryman wrote: post #21
Zoepfli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and that message is "art is as much about the object itself as it is about its sociological context." Put something into a museum and everybody will look at it reverently. Sell it on the street and most will ignore it. Sad. But human.

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.

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#25

Post by nrivadeneira »

spinlock wrote: post #12

Was that guy Banksy? I thought he never let himself be photographed without a disguise? My favorite Banksy was outside of Galapagos when it was in Williamsburg. I loved walking by it until Splatter destroyed it. Now, I'm actually in NYC for Comicon and I find out that Banksy was in Central Park .... I'm so sad now.

I don't think it was Banksy. Most likely just a guy Banksy hired to sell the pieces.

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#26

Post by nrivadeneira »

tehwebguy wrote: post #18
alwaysinshade wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ironic It's zero-day art. The people who try to preserve it by bolting glass plates over the top are missing the point.

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"

I think it's more because graffiti is, by nature, defacing. So, someone defaced a defacing.

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#27

Post by yetanotherphd »

Rimpinths wrote: post #22
vinceguidry wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

Wow, that is one hell of a smug article.

>As metro stations go, L'Enfant Plaza is more plebeian than most.

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#28

Post by mherdeg »

grinich wrote: post #20
Zoepfli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and that message is "art is as much about the object itself as it is about its sociological context." Put something into a museum and everybody will look at it reverently. Sell it on the street and most will ignore it. Sad. But human.

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 tha…

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... .

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#29

Post by vacri »

Zoepfli wrote: post #16
norswap wrote: post #14

I love that I get the feeling there is a message that wants to get out of the experiment, but that it isn't explicitly stated.

Yes, and that message is "art is as much about the object itself as it is about its sociological context." Put something into a museum and everybody will look at it reverently. Sell it on the street and most will ignore it. Sad. But human.

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.

Re: Central Park (Banksy)

#30

Post by mherdeg »

yetanotherphd wrote: post #27
Rimpinths wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

Wow, that is one hell of a smug article. >As metro stations go, L'Enfant Plaza is more plebeian than most.

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.

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