UK Artist Banksy Goes Postal in Greater NY Area
Permalink: http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/03/uk_artist_banks.html
via NYTimes:
Need Talent to Exhibit in Museums? Not This Prankster
By RANDY KENNEDY
Okay, whoever thought up/approved this idiotic title over at the
NYTimes should be taken out and shot. But do check out the Times'
slide show of Banksy inserting things on walls at local museums.
"…over the last two weeks, a shadowy British graffiti artist who
calls himself Banksy has carried his own humorous artworks into four
New York institutions - the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural
History - and attached them with some sort of adhesive to the walls,
alongside other paintings and exhibits. Similar stunts at the Louvre
and the Tate museum have earned the artist - who will not reveal his
real name - a following in Europe, where he has had successful gallery
shows and sold thousands of books of his artwork. But his graffiti has
also landed him in legal trouble.
"Elyse Topalian, a spokeswoman for the Met, said that museum officials
believed that a painting found there - a small, gold-framed portrait
of a woman wearing a gas mask - was hung surreptitiously on March 13.
Guards noticed it and removed it from a wall near other paintings in
the American wing, she said. Ms. Topalian added that no damage had
been done to the wall or to other artworks.
"The museum does not look kindly on such unauthorized additions to its
walls. "I think it's fair to say that it would take more than a piece
of Scotch tape to get a work of art into the Met," Ms. Topalian
said…."
"…Pictures of the illicit art installations, apparently taken by an
accomplice of Banksy, were posted yesterday at woostercollective.com,
a site that has become a repository of pictures of graffiti and other
street and urban art. Some of the pictures show a bearded man in an
overcoat and hat, looking a little like Inspector Jacques Clouseau,
hanging his paintings in the museums.
"…Banksy - who prefers to be called not an artist, but a "quality
vandal" - said he decided to invade those four New York museums for a
simple reason.
"'I've wandered round a lot of art galleries thinking, "I could have
done that,"so it seemed only right that I should try,' he wrote.
'These galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of
millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they see.'
"He said he had entered all of the museums during normal visitors'
hours. Asked how he was able to hang his works without being noticed
by museum guards or security cameras, Banksy responded rather
opaquely. 'You just have to glue on a fake beard and move with the
times,' he said."
[…]
Read about this story at the Wooster Collective;for those as yet
unacquainted with Banksy's talents here's his homepage. Also here's a
collection of his graffiti in and around London.
Thursday, March 24, 2005 at 04:11 PM in Misc. | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2005/03/uk_artist_banks.html
UK Artist Banksy Goes Postal in Greater NY Area (via NEWSgrist)
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