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New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#601

Post by Shocka1 »

monooso wrote: post #492
declan_roberts wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on display in downtown London dude. Also who do you think paid for it?

It was erected surreptitiously in the dead of night. That does not imply state approval. As for who paid for it, I don't know, possibly the extremely successful and wealthy artist who created it. If you have any evidence to the contrary, by all means present it.

Anecdote, a close family member of mine is a director of arts for a very large city in the US. They typically install/uninstall at night - she's told me this is especially important with cultural or otherwise edgy pieces.

Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#602

Post by tialaramex »

blitzar wrote: post #403
ChoGGi wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pound shop == dollar store I suppose I should've figured that one out.

Its because we have the metric system over here

Good point, historically British currency wasn't decimal. "Decimal Day" in which the pound was divided into 100 new pennies happened just a few years before I was born. So I grew up with the physical coins often still denominated in shillings or old (pre-decimal) pence, but knowing (since it was true from before I'd been born) what their actual value was in the only currency system I had ever experienced, so e.g. I see a shilling, I know it's actually 5 new pence. By the time I was a teenager there were very few actual shillings in circulation and lots of new 5p coins and then the coins were deliberately reduced in size anyway, obviously if you still had a shilling it was now obsolete because it was the wrong size.

My mother grew up with the currency around her not being decimal but by her teens the government were explicitly warning that this was coming and she learned that e.g. a pound has 100 new pence in school ready for a career where this would soon go from theory to practice, when she finished school the poster campaigns were running IIRC.

Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#603

Post by sadmad »

mindslight wrote: post #545
something765478 wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Authorities on Thursday placed safety barriers around the statue as growing crowds of onlookers gathered The fact that the statue was allowed to stay up means that the authorities approved it. So, Banksy isn't really counterculture, he's government approved counterculture.

Your assumption that government power will invariably be (ab)used to oppress messages the people in government do not like is a dynamic of fascism, not a universal truth.

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Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#604

Post by [deleted] »

briansm wrote: post #586
EchoReflection wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a good quote. I have to say though, despite the appeal of "rejecting 'tribalism' ", it is (or should be) "undeniable" that some "tribes" are "better" than others. There are reasons literally nobody wants to go to North Korea and people all over the world want to "flee" to countries that are meritocracies and support ideas like freedom of speech, women's rights, freedom of religion, etc. "Nobody" would claim (a…

In the developed world we have 'energy slaves' instead; around 100 per person in the USA in the 2020's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave This is arguably the reason why the Overton window has shifted towards the rejection of human slavery over the last century or so, with the growth of fossil fuel use. Human slavery will thus likely swing back into fashion again in the future as oil, coal and natural gas ru…

[deleted]

Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#605

Post by card_zero »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #517
card_zero wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just means you're both wrong. "Its location - Waterloo Place, St James's - is an area designed to celebrate imperialism and military dominance in the 1800s", says the BBC. Banksy is from Bristol, where they threw a statue of a slave-trading philanthropist in the river. The statue is wearing a suit. It's not very interpretable. We can wonder whether it's about the Conservative party or the Reform party, but nobod…

Every single comment that proudly declares "my interpretation is obviously the correct one and you other guys are wrong" only further serves to prove what an actual great piece of art this is. That is, it's art that makes you think and can be validly interpreted in many different ways, and more serves as a projection of the own viewer. Who necessarily cares what the original design of Waterloo Place is for, it's also…

That's not brilliant, and it's not important to art. It's more like clickbait.

The statue is blank because deliberate ambiguity is the arty thing to do, because provocation is supposed to be a praiseworthy aspect of art.

But it's paper-thin ambiguity, and ambiguity isn't praiseworthy anyway. Inexplicit meaning is praiseworthy, but that's something else. This statue just has a veneer to suggest that it might possibly be saying something other than what the artist obviously thinks, if you know all about him, as we do.

Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#606

Post by card_zero »

IAmBroom wrote: post #579
card_zero wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does the "art is about inciting a response" theory originate from? I went and looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_art but couldn't find it there. The "anti-essentialist" section is good, though, I think. It has Berys Gaut listing ten properties of art, all of which are nice-to-have but none of which are essential. Then if a piece ticks lots of boxes it's a shoo-in, but if it doesn't tick many of t…

You are both entitled to your own definitions of "art".

Relativist.

It's an idea, it describes something real. We can all make our own guesses and our own assertions about what that is, and then we can critique them and try to make them agree. There's no point just saying "we can all think whatever we like about anything" and leaving it there.

Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#608

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

boxed wrote: post #593
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you asked! Perhaps I should have used the term “sovereign state”, as that’s more precise, even though when most people use the colloquial term “nation” (as in “nationalism”) they’re referring to a sovereign state. A sovereign state has borders they can enforce to their own discretion (political gridlock notwithstanding), a stable and well-defined (non-transient) population, a single recognized government (both i…

Yea but that falls apart on even a slight poke. Who is trans? Anyone who identifies as trans. Who is British? Anyone who identifies as British. There's not a lot of difference there. Citizenship COULD be used, but now you're talking about two different domains of language. A person who is British but now has an American citizenship, still talks with a British accent and identifies as British is still British. The sam…

I’m not following your argument at all, could you try to word it differently?

The distinction I’m drawing is that flags that represent peoples are usually more ideologically pure: people seeking justice or rights. They may be co-opted over time by more actors who deviate from the original intention (e.g. Gadsden Flag).

Nation flags, on the other hand, are by definition exclusionary towards an outgroup that exists by legal distinction. In the historical record, nationalism rarely works out well for anyone who sits outside the definition of a nation. Nationalism is a useful tool during wartime, especially during the early years of a nation (e.g. colonial revolutions) or when facing an existential threat (e.g. Ukraine), but it’s an ideological debt that may end up being paid by future generations when someone comes along and wraps themselves and their ideology in the flag and paints their opposition as “unamerican”, for example.

Is your point that all flags have the same ideological utility no matter what they represent? Or is your point not talking about flags at all and instead focusing on the difference between “sovereign state” and “nation”?

Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#609

Post by [deleted] »

pydry wrote: post #599
foldr wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the jealously part, but the highbrow part seems off to me. Brooker has always shown much more interest in distinctly lowbrow art forms such as video games. I don't think he is sneering at Banksy because he thinks we should be looking at the paintings of the Old Masters instead.

Right but he knows guardian readers think that and he's pandering to their snobbery with his comments about Banksy rolling around in the pop culture mud. At the same time it's painfully obvious it riled him up being a more obscure and less famous equivalent of banksy.

[deleted]

Re: New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

#610

Post by mootothemax »

gerdesj wrote: post #590
mootothemax wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is Avon? Welsh for river.

There is also a nebulous region within England that might be called Avon, depending on the moon's phase and the price of loons. There is a river Avon in England. Welsh at least (inst. celtae) has a noun for "river" which is "afon".

Recommend looking up the pronunciation of that there afon :)
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