Banksy, a pioneer in modern art pushing the boundaries with his combination of graffiti and fine art poking fun and making policatal statements – the great artist of our time….or supremely over-rated? Whichever side you take you can’t deny Banksy’s work has done a great deal for art in our generation, bringing the acceptance of graffiti as a real form of art and causing much debate and controversy. Banksy is now, at least here in the UK, a household name.
The story goes, as I’m sure you have all heard, that the museum was closed for a day and all staff sent home, and in secret Banksy was brought in to install his works in secret and ended up wreaking his trademark style havoc across the entire building. So is it really all that much? Or is it just a few stencils here and there? Well, it’s actually a surprisingly large quantity of work hidden across every single room of the museums 3 floors along with the actual exhibiton in the gallery, the animatronic work from his ‘Pet Shop’ in the states brought over and filling the main hall, and an anarchic setup in the entrance hall.
The work varies in tone, from heavy political satire to plain silly and some quite profound statements. One that particularily stuck with me was a rather beatiful painting of a woodland landscape with rolling mountain backgrounds with “*subject to availability for a limited period only” printed in the bottom corner – amusing at first until it fully sinks in and it becomes rather a saddening and powerful statement on the destruction of the environment. But of course the seriousness is all balanced out with things like a toy panda head stuck on a plaque on the wall oposite above a traditional portrait with added comedy Groucho Marx glasses.
If you’re considering going to this then I’d certainly recommend you do, and make a day of it so you can hunt out all the hidden gems. The pictures here aren’t even a quarter of the work scattered about!
