I am intrigued by street art, and have blogged a few times about the British street artist Banksy. For example, here.
So I wanted to share Nicholas Barber’s article “The Full Banksy Experience” at More Intelligent Life.
“Last week I was driving home along an unlovely stretch of main road in east London,” writes Barber, “when I saw what looked like a billboard on the side of a building. It had a friendly message printed in neat black letters: ‘Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock.’
“It took a few seconds to process. It was definitely pithy, and definitely cheered me up at the end of a boring drive, but what was it? An advert? Did it have The Economist’s red logo at the bottom? Or was it … could it be … a Banksy?
“A few days later, an item in the local paper confirmed that it was indeed a Bansky, and a photo was on the artist’s website. I felt as if I’d lucked into a new artistic experience.
“The pleasure you get from a Banksy comes from the whole process: the chancing upon on an artwork in the unlikeliest of places, the speculation over how it got there, the uncertainty over whether it’s his or not, the subsequent authentication, and then the knowledge that it might have been rubbed out by the time you return.”
That is similar to my own reaction, except for the fact that I knew what I was looking for. And to this day, it has not been “authenticated.” Do you think it looks like a Banksy?
