Exit through the alley - Dudes charge folks to see Banksy's street art

These men, heroes that they are, have elevated the original work, turning it into a performance piece about the commodification and hipster-fication of people’s homes. If you’re going to treat a neighborhood like an art museum, why shouldn’t the residents of that neighborhood charge admission like an art museum, particularly when many New Yorkers would never come to that patch of the city but to take a picture of a stencil painting of a beaver?

So delicious. I’m sure Banksy is laughing his ass off.

It almost makes sense. Logic train follows: This Banksy guy is some kind of famous artist, there are books and a movie out about him. Oh hey, here is some of his actual work I can see in person. Aw, there’s a cover. Well, I have money for it. Here you go, hoodlums!

It’s pretty smart of them I think. Everyone knows that anything of value left in public reach is going to get stolen or destroyed, the smart people figure out a way to make money off it before that happens. It reminds me of people who charge for parking in their driveways or on their lawns when there’s a big event happening nearby and official parking is limited.

Meanwhile today he set up a stall in central park and sold signed original art for $60 a pop.

http://www.banksy.co.uk/2013/10/13/central-park

The stuff is valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And apparently didn’t sell much of it (according to CNN). I wish I had been there, I would have bought a few for investment. I hate myself.

Watch the youtube video on that page, it is a timelapse of the entire day. At the end he only sold $450 dollars worth, some of it at half price.

I want to know if the folks who did buy from his Central Park stall have subsequently been told or found out what they’ve got. That would be quite a thrill.

Casual racism is awesome!

Just think what this is going to do for the art selling street-merchant market in the short term. Every starving artist in the city is going to be selling knock-off spray art and people are going to snatch it up…just in case it’s him again

So pretty much this has to prove one of these things:

  1. His art actually sucks, since no one wanted to buy it.
  2. He’s not as famous as he thinks he is, since no one recognized his art
  3. His art is decent, but the medium is important. No one wants to buy a stupid stencil on a canvas. His art is subversive street art only and worthless on a wall
  4. All art, including his, is subjective and on that day people just werent interested.

Personally, I think Banksy chooses cool subjects and cool locations, but I would never want to see a canvas of his in a real museum. What belongs in a museum is say the piece of Israeli wall that he did the little girl with balloons stencil or the little girl frisking the guard. They’d need to take a picture of where it really is for context. Long story short - Banksy is just not the kind of art you buy for your living room. That’s why he didn’t sell many.

Of course if people knew it was valuable they would have bought it just like they would buy anything overvalued like cheap diamonds. To be honest though … It would be very easy to just reproduce these images yourself with a stencil printed from an image of the original. Maybe people recognized them and thought they were fakes? Or maybe people just didn’t care.

I must have missed something in the tape. Did something go down? I didn’t see anY racism…

Probably this. Maybe a fair number of people recognised the ‘Banksy’ style, but being a street vendor is not his thing so they immediately disregarded the stall as knock-off.

I guess he’s an American celebrity since the only place I know him from, is Simpsons. I did like what I have seen, though.

Either way, pretty humbling day for him. Though as an artist with an ego, he probably sees it differently, like “people don’t appreciate real art” or some other defensive stance. Poor guy.

Not necessarily. A stall in Central Park is not a Christie’s auction. If you want to judge his success, you should compare the $450 to whatever a typical vendor makes in a day.

This reminds of when Joshua Bell played an impromptu free concert in the subway. Not many people stopped to listen. But how could they? It was during the morning rush, and they needed to get to work on time.

It’s silly to judge artists by their ability to capture an audience right at the moment that they have no interest in enjoying art. It’s like judging a master chef by whether diners want to eat a five course dinner when they aren’t hungry at all.

not really, since I assume he expected this outcome. On account of:

Art is subjective, and context matters. Everybody with half a brain in the art world must realize that it’s all a very elaborate scam, and Banksy seems like he has half a brain. From what little I know about him, I would assume that he was making an intentional point about commercialism.

“They have been guarding it for a while drinking heavily, so who knows. They are pretty angry about how many white people are coming here.”

Interestingly, some of the Banksy pieces are now being “vandalized,” although I’m partly amused by the notion that street art can be subject to any sort of protection to begin with, or if the artist would even care one way or the other.

As for the art sale, I might have been tempted to buy one of the “not a photograph opportunity” signs, or maybe see if the “$60” sign was for sale. Really though, it makes me think I should just paint my own stuff, and maybe that’s the point.

If you watched the docu/mocu/fake-mentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, you’d know that Banksy is well aware of how much hype works in modern art. The $60 street vendor stunt was very much a performance piece along the same lines. When no one knows it’s his stuff, the value goes down a lot.

Banksy’s new bit:

It’s gonna travel around to the front of different McD’s every day, with a real live shoeshine boy.