Art Critic Article On Banksy's Work By Jonathan Jones
Best of British?
Banksy is the most exciting artist to come out of the UK for more than a decade - or so many people on both sides of the Atlantic will tell you. But is he really so much more than a prankster with a spray can? Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones gives his view
It's not often you hear someone roar the name of an artist as if they were cheering on a football player. In Bristol, however, I once heard a man scream out "Banksyyy!" as he walked past one of his murals. He was in good company. Hollywood, the New Yorker magazine, Sotheby's (which sells him), Damien Hirst (who collects him) and Glastonbury (where he recreated Stonehenge with a group of portable toilets) all concur that Banksy is the artist of our time, the rising star, the news. A poll of 18- to 25-year-olds recently named him an "arts hero" in third place behind Walt Disney and Peter Kay, and ahead of Leonardo da Vinci.
The cult of Banksy is a broad church, ranging from millionaire bankers splashing out on "street sculpture" to young book buyers radicalised by Iraq. His bestselling tome Wall and Piece is perfectly calculated to divert the leftist on the loo. Not only does it remind us that Banksy went to the US and painted "Fat Lane" on the sidewalk at Venice Beach - it even has a photograph of a fat American walking past it.
America was originally just a great target for Banksy - but then it unexpectedly took him to heart when he put orange-clad sculptures of Guantánamo prisoners in Disneyland. That was a taster for last year's one-man exhibition in Los Angeles, the opening of which was attended by the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. There were massive queues to see the show's installation of a living room with 18th-century pictures on the walls, containing a live elephant with its body painted pink and gold.
Suddenly Banksy was no longer a merely British obsession. A couple of months ago he got an accolade he could scarcely have dreamed of when he was spraying...
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