BANKSY - some farty artist who should be spray-painted "ASSHOLE"

So, he's some British twit with one of those oh-so-cute idiot Brit nicknames. You know, like "Macca" is McCartney, and "Buncie" is Steve Bunce.

BANKSY.

I'd rather see a fucking murder story in the paper than a piece on BANKSY romping around America being a fucking asshole and getting oohs and ahhs for it.

BANKSY?

The name may be cute, but he isn't. He's just another "infant terrible," huh, which translates from the French as a CHILDISH BABY who needs to call attention to himself with his diaper full of shit.

The piece begins by complaining that poor BANKSY had some of his GRAFFITI ART defaced. See, HE is an artist, but someone who counter-attacks and spray paints on his crap...that person is the "dick."

First off. GRAFFITI is NOT ART. I know, because I COULD DO IT. It takes no great skill to scrawl a slogan or your "TAG" on a building. It's just ugly and egotistic. As for an entire mural, it's usually something well below the level of comic book art or even ANIME. If you're so fucking good, go over to Marvel Comics and wave your spray can around and GET PAID. Otherwise, FUCK OFF.

The New Yorker who spray painted "FUCK BANKSY" should get a medal. Or an art exhibit somewhere. This person is rightly jealous that with all the thugs, hoods, morons, illegals and swine who do what BANKSY does...they don't get the newspaper write-ups he gets. The quality is the same, but it's the packaging, isn't it? BANKSY has worked very carefully to build up his image. He's that calculated. No different from the beer or perfume company that spends more on the shape of the bottle or the sound of the radio jingle than the taste of the drink.

It's all too easy to get "famous" by bad behavior. After a while, people say, "Oh, oooh, I heard of THAT person..."

Like the dead DEAD Keith Haring, a twerp who took chalk and drew simple-minded figures in the subway. Back then, when a subway ad had run its 30 days, it was removed and replaced by an inviting sheet of black paper. So, artboy Keith wandered around chalking up the black paper with his peculiar cartoons. After a while, he became known as that strange guy who drew simple-minded cartoons, and everyone smiled and gave him millions of dollars and declared him an ARTIST.

And then he died of AIDS. But...he was a pioneer. Not an artist, really. Nothing he's done endures. It's shit. But he did pioneer...being a pain in the ass and abusing public and private property for self-promotion.

BANKSY probably has a publicist that bribes writers to report on him, but if you're persistent like Haring was, and fit the demographic of the gay art world, or have some kind of posh, tastelessness that will appeal to dimwit whore-wives of hedge fund weasels...you can make millions after scrawling on the subway or defacing a few buildings.

BANKSY knows that riding around in a truck with some stuffed animals is good publicity. He might not make money off that particular bit of "performance art," unless he can hoodwink a museum into buying the truck and the animals for a display in their lobby...but it'll sell some BANKSY paintings in a gallery, or get him an invitation to lecture at $10,000 for the evening plus transportation and hotel.

He's learned from master charlatans who have done so well recently, from the photographer who takes over a street with skaggy spray-painted nude girls, to the creep and his wife who put up a bunch of "SCHMATTAS" (rags) in Central Park that were declared profound. PS, those who declared it garbage couldn't argue with the ultimate result...that tourists flocked to see this nonsense, and the city made millions because of that. MONEY makes it RIGHT. And ART. And it makes a fortune for a wily provocateur.

"To be honest," the world of art is not honest. It's built on smoke and mirrors. Rich idiots who haven't a clue, and are frightened of being found out, have declared that just about ANYTHING is ART. That justifies them spending millions for Jackson Pollack paint specks, or a Warhol soup can, or Roy Lichtenstein's blow-ups of comic book art.

Meanwhile, actual artists with the skill of a Courbet, Massys, Arcimboldo, Dali...get no attention. I'm not saying that you have to be able to paint the Mona Lisa to be called an artist. Some works by Picasso or Miro are just challenging displays of shapes, and technically a teenager in an art class could arrange a bunch of lines and shapes and colors out of a Colorforms set. But they did it first. Yoko Ono's performance art and other pieces also are challenging. Graffiti is not. Being an asshole in public and calling attention to yourself so you can get a bigger name and sell your crap in a gallery is not. That's just amateurism, promotion, commercial bullshit, and not amusing.

I don't know what this BANKSY guy has done in merry Olde England that people have found amusing, but graffiti or stuffed animals in a truck...NOT impressive to ME.

BANKSY is laughing all the way to the bank, which does appeal to my cynicism, and my hatred for fools who fall for utter crap. Even so, he can shove his spray cans up his ass and stop defacing buildings he doesn't own, and stop clogging the streets with his dumbass pranks. Van Gogh didn't stoop to bullshit. He painted. He did it on canvas. He didn't go paint something on the side of somebody's office building. People would've thought he was CRAZY. Don McLean sang about how Van Gogh suffered. I think BANKSY should suffer. It might improve his (f)art.

Encouraging pretentious, shrewd commercial hacks is disgusting. There's an asshole who takes chalk to sidewalk most every day, drawing a simple outline of a fish, and the words "Live your dream." He also walks by piles of rubbish and draws it on a discarded broken table top or a cardboard box. Turns out, he had a few art stores stock is "paintings," which are nothing but...you guessed it...the outline of a fucking fish and a slogan. Something the dentist can put on his wall to make someone's teeth ache a little bit more. This (F)artist is living his dream...which is to hoodwink people into buying utter crap because they're familiar with it, recognize it, and are so simple-minded that they have to nod and say, "Yeah, yeah...I need that on my wall!" Like they need an extra tattoo, or an enema.

"Oh, that BANKSY...he's a merry prankster...an artist..." ...an ASSHOLE.