Last week, a well-known artist, who has pioneered a new public form of satire for the better part of a decade, unveiled a new venture that has drawn a great deal of unnecessary criticism. No, I’m not talking about the stupid Banksy store; I’m talking about @dril’s TruthPoint: Darkweb Rising. It’s fucking good, go watch it.
On the other hand: Banksy, a tired, bloated persona of fake street authenticity, decided to murder the last shreds of his credibility and finally opened up a luxury e-commerce store called Gross Domestic Product for his terrible bullshit art. The artist states it was to protect his brand as another company was attempting to copyright the name. What a world, huh?
Finding out there is a Banksy store for rat clocks and Tony the Tiger floormats and throw pillows with cheeky statements on them should immediately elicit a groan, nothing more. I’m not angry, I’m just tired of the schtick. It’s dull, lifeless art and the fact that it sells for millions speaks to the vacuous nature of our current taste. Get it? The rat is chasing time, as if stuck in a “rat race” of some kind!
There’s a healthy hesitation to resist introducing commerce into art. Our collective yawn is natural and normal to see such a high profile (and wealthy) artist deciding to open up what is essentially a fake revolutionary Etsy shop. The guy recently sold what is basically a bad Adbusters cover of British MPs as chimpanzees for £9.9 million (or $12.8 million). This also comes after publicly shredding a print of Girl with a Balloon immediately after its $1.4 million sale. I’ll give him credit, that was kind of funny up until the point the rich asshole who bought it ended up being happy and said:
When the hammer came down last week and the work was shredded, I was at first shocked, but gradually I began to realize that I would end up with my own piece of art history.
Some rich idiot
The shredded art was subsequently renamed as Love Is In The Bin. It’s not that Banksy has sold art, it’s that the art he has sold just fucking sucks. It’s hack garbage, fake street art for fake revolutionaries. (It was crap when he was a non-household name, too. )
His desire for authenticity with titles like I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit is self-contradictory. “I can’t stand how rich and famous I am,” is a classic line from someone who actually enjoys both of those things. His anonymity creates a manufactured sense of mystery that helps push the artificial authenticity. His street art was never meant to inspire anyone and if so, inspire them to what exactly? It’s boring provocation without any sense of result. It’s empty politics.
This is not mass, decentralized art meant for a mass, decentralized movement. It’s a market commodity meant to ride a populist wave of anger for profits. This is not meant to inspire anyone. It has no call to action. His stuff is meant for Target Store level consumption, the political version of “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.” In his defense, I can honestly see why the artist would want to protect their work from corporate exploitation, however. An artist myself, I empathize with that. There are also probably less scrupulous entities that Banksy could employ to happily churn out tote bags and phone cases. (His store also sells t-shirts for $38 and coffee mugs for $13, a more working class price range.)
The bulk of Bansky’s elite art store prices its handmade but semi-mass productions as high as $1,000, so it’s art meant for a particular type of collector. This is not street art for the people actually on a street. The buyer is more interested in the name than the art at this level, eager to resell the limited stock to another buyer. Its byzantine rules are also strange. This garbage could go for hundreds of thousands, so it’s a statement (?) of some kind, but also, when we get down to it, it’s just an online shop.
In truth, I don’t actually mind when artists monetize their work or sell merch. I’d be an enormous hypocrite and sermonizing prick if I did. Go nuts, do a capitalism. We have an overly romanticized view of the “starving artist”. We live in a society and so forth. (One of my favorite things to do is go to art walks and try to find something cool and handmade.) When you decide to start doing leftist art, there is no aura that suddenly appears around you and makes all your bills vanish. Art is seen as some external activity, decoupled from capitalist activity despite depending on capitalist resources to be created. Art is seen as having no utility function, but that greatly depends on your definition of “utility”.
Art has been intentionally decommodified, except in ways that it can be used to create economic activity, such as advertising or graphic design. You get branded a “sellout” for crossing an imaginary threshold from artist to brand, which has less to do with wealth and more to do with your presentation of your wealth. This can be a rather reactionary position, as capitalism has no use for uncommodified art, so you get yelled at for attempting an “unrealistic” career in the arts. Just learn to code, as if painting, digital art, and video don’t take a similar level of discipline and knowledge. (Look at any design work an engineer or developer does and tell me design is not a skill.)
Banksy is not a sellout, he had nothing to sell out in the first place. He’s just playing the game, hypocritically hating it all the way. His art sucks, his true fans either college freshman prototypes or self-serious art snobs. The fetishistic collecting of his street art is in itself an indictment of how art movements are commodified. His 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, a transparently bogus documentary of the fecundity of Banksy knockoffs, has become his own story. He is self-parody. For someone so famous and influential, we deserve art with more meaningful statements than “phones bad” or “Rembrandt with googly eyes”.
If Banksy wanted to make a real statement, he should destroy all of his art and then stop making his hack juvenile trash. He should name his next piece “Child Rapist” or some other incredibly vulgar term or image impossible to reproduce on a coffee mug. If he really meant it, but he doesn’t. He wants to not push too many boundaries, except the ones that art dealers and auction houses can safely monetize.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.