Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
It's funny . |
| Disadvantages: |
It's not as good as seeing it "in the flesh" |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
You haven’t heard of Banksy right? You don’t know who he is? You don’t know what this op is going to be about right?
Wrong.
The chances are incredibly high that you do know something about him; you’ve just forgotten his name. You heard a snippet about him: something that just made you smile for thirty seconds and then you carried on with your day.
Let me remind you about the Banksy you already know…
He’s the maniac who got on the News for managing to smuggle one of his pieces of art INTO Tate Britain and embarrassed everyone because nobody seemed to notice…
He’s the wit behind the stencilled “Mind the Crap” writing that appeared overnight on the steps to Tate Modern…
He’s the chap behind the most controversial of exhibitions that ultimately had to be closed down because of the outrage caused by a variety of exhibits; not least a painting of the Madonna holding the baby Jesus with dynamite strapped around his little body…
Oh yes, you know Banksy alright.
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He’s the most controversial and downright interesting graffiti artist at large in the UK today.
So if you want to have some of your comfy confidences challenged, if you want to be forced at banana-point to consider the power of the media and the dumbing down of the graphic artist’s world…and if you want to laugh out loud then you could do a lot worse than turning to www.banksy.co.uk
The site will start with what you think is a strange, incomplete sentence…”The Anger Management”. Don’t start blaming your broadband provider for messing up too quickly though because the sentence will eventually be completed thus:
“Isn’t Working.”
OK so I think we all get the idea that we need to keep our wits about us. The Welcome page comes next and has the distressing image of that poor Vietnamese naked child running distorted to include her apparently holding hands with Ronald MacDonald and Mickey Mouse…
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Banksy’s whole aim is to shock you, to take known images and turn them on their heads. He generally works at night in London and Bristol; he refuses to give interviews, doesn’t sell his work and maintains secrecy around his identity. Of course, he spends a good deal of time defacing public property – that’s illegal in the UK, and that is what causes the furore of criticism that surrounds him. It’s also what makes his work pithy and funny.
Stencilling cows on a tranquil farm with the simple word Banksy on their flanks seems funny to me. (No cows were damaged…blah blah blah…you understand).
Painting “Designated Picnic Area” on a pile of rubble in North London makes me laugh.
Daubing “Designated Riot Area” on the base of Nelson’s Column seems rather more troubling…
His next assignment is apparently going to be to glue a “sculpture” onto a street somewhere; you can sign up to get details of the unveiling if you wish, via the News tab. Elsewhere you ca see some of his graffiti on the Outdoors or Indoors tabs, along with the all important captions that go alongside them. So the picture of the rat has the thought “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat” to ensure that we understand that this is political, it is anti-brand (he’s coined the phrase “brandalism” for much of his graffiti), it is anti-globalisation and it is basically anti-THEM!
If anything, this is the only problem I have with some of Banksy’s art: the political message is clearly anarchic, leftist and all the rest of it, but it doesn’t seem particularly cohesive and one is left wondering if his automatic reaction is just to rail because the railing is good…
In the grand scheme of things I guess it matters fairly little, I just take comfort that there is somebody railing against the machine on my behalf, because I’m much too comfortable and cowardly to do it myself. The fact that he does it with wit and panache is a bonus of huge proportions.
Now obviously the website does not show all his work, and equally I don’t want to walk you through all of it and spoil all the surprises for you, but there is a good deal more to the website than the Outdoors and Indoors tabs that open to reveal the graffiti.
Under the tab entitled “Cuttings” I was surprised to find…some cuttings. I know, I thought that was far too literal for him! Still, they make fun reading to see what the tabloids have made of his exploits to date (including some fabulous eurgh-Jamie-Oliver-throws-toys-out-of-pram-shocker on behalf of those much put-upon cattle).
The comments section is also surprisingly entertaining. Here people are encouraged to write in and clearly the only letters that get through the Banksy censor machine are generally from fellow graffitiers (well is that a word??) from around the world who feel it is incumbent upon them to copy Banksy’s style and daub their own walls with copy graffiti in his honour! This made me die really; to miss the point of originality just seemed staggering to me…still…it does make for entertaining reading.
The Manifesto tab remains a mystery to me, having read it several times now and I intend leaving it as a mystery for you too…
And finally there is a virtually useless help feature (in the time-honoured sense that it doesn’t give you help about the site but rather explains how to make your own stencils and follow in his paint-splattered doc martins…) and a links tab which does actually provide some fascinating links to some mild and some rather hardcore graffiti sites. Marvellous.
So that is the site. Arguably not as good as buying a book of his work (which you can do) yet somehow more in keeping with the transitory nature of his graffiti art. Take a look at it – you’ll be disgusted, you’ll be forced to laugh, you’ll be shocked, you’ll be amazed and you may well be the sort of person who never wants to look at it again.
I think we all know that that’s OK too.
I’m not Banksy mad, but I do think there is a certain humour in a man having his own tag line thus:
“Glamorising grime since 1989”
It even rhymes.
The website gets four stars from one, mostly because the subject matter is so wonderful. The loss of a star is down to my raised eyebrow over the politic message and my inability to make sense of the Manifesto that I’ve refused to tell you anything about in this review. Confusing eh?
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I asked Ciao to add a category for www.Banksy.com a couple of months ago. By the time they did I couldn’t find any Banksy stuff on the
internet at all for a few months – apparently many lawyers were involved! Now the only one that is back is www.Banksy.co.uk which you get automatically routed to if you type www.Banksy.com so no harm done eh?!
