Banksy Art (1990-Now)

 This blog will be slightly different from my past blogs. In the past I have covered specific styles of art, and artwork in a certain place and time. In this blog I will instead be covering the artworks of a single artist, known only as “Banksy”. Banksy is an anonymous England-based graffiti artist who uses his art as a form of political activism. His art is always politically involved in some form or another, usually acting as not-so-subtle commentary on political and social issues. As a graffiti artist, what he’s doing is technically a crime, which he states as one of the reasons he prefers to remain anonymous. In the early stages of his career(1990-2000), he was often chased by police before he was able to finish the artworks, so he switched to stenciling because it is a much faster method of graffitiing. In the present day, his artwork can be found all over the world, not just in the United Kingdom. He has visited political hotspots such as Ukraine following the Russian invasion, and the West Bank in Palestine, which is a location that I have made an art blog about in the past. Because of the popularity of Banksy’s art, people want to buy it. The issue with this is that his art is not typically painted onto an easily movable canvas, no, it is spray painted onto the walls of buildings. The solution to this problem is cutting out the section of whatever it was painted on that contains the art, and selling the entire section of wall/bridge. Banksy has spray painted his artworks onto actual canvases in the past, typically to raise funds for various charitable causes. His most notable instance of a painting on an actual canvas is the first/second piece(s) of art of this blog.


The first piece of art for this blog was originally titled “Girl with Balloon” and then was later called “Love is in the Bin”, after a certain incident involving a hidden shredder and 25 million US dollars. This section will be talking about “Girl with balloon”, because I count “Love is in the Bin” a separate thing. “Girl with balloon” is not one single painting, but several paintings that Banksy made all across London, all of which look the same. The paintings show a little girl reaching for a red heart shaped (pictogram not anatomical) balloon floating away, just out of reach (although the girl does not seem too desperate to get the balloon back, as she is standing upright and doesn’t appear to be chasing after it). Perhaps Banksy elected not to depict the girl chasing the balloon because then it wouldn’t have looked as cool. By my count, close to 900 official pieces of “Girl with Balloon” have been found including all its variations, and several unofficial ones have surfaced since then, such as the one comedically tattooed onto famous washed-up singer and songwriter Justin Bieber. The particular picture of “Girl with Balloon” included in this blog was found on Waterloo bridge in London.



The second piece of art for this blog is “Love is in the Bin”, which was the new name for “Girl with Balloon” after the aforementioned shredder incident, which I will talk about here. In 2006, Banksy created a copy of “Girl with Balloon”, this time on a framed canvas, whose frame Banksy created himself (this is an important detail). The painting was given to a friend of Banksy’s, with the intention of it never being sold on auction. It was a gift to the friend, and despite this it still ended up on auction in 2018. Promptly after being sold, a hidden shredder mechanism within the frame that Banksy himself had created went off, and shredded half of the piece of art from the bottom up. Banksy has stated that he intended for the entire piece to be shredded, likely as a political statement about the sale of art, but the mechanism failed to work to completion. The half-shredded piece was renamed to “Love is in the Bin” and was sold at full price to the buyer. It resold three years later at more than twenty times the price it sold for in 2018, which I’m sure Banksy had a lot of feelings about.


The third piece of art for this blog is one of several pieces found in Ukraine, unofficially titled “Solidarity with Ukraine” The Wikipedia file for this piece is titled “Children of War, Maidan”, but this does not appear to be the actual title of the piece. This piece in particular depicts two young children on a seesaw, except it is not a normal seesaw, it is a tank trap being used in the Russo-Ukrainian war. This piece shows a harsh reality of war; wars are not enacted in isolation. If you or your loved ones are not active members of the military, and there is no invasion going on where you live, you can very easily be under the impression that the only people affected by war are the soldiers fighting them. This is not true, wars do not happen in the middle of nowhere, they happen in places where people live. Civilians and children, not just soldiers, all live in those places, and they are harshly affected by the ongoing war. This sentence was going to say that we haven’t had a serious attack on our own soil since World War Two, but after a few sentences I remembered that 9/11 happened so I had to backtrack. Regardless, we haven’t had a serious invasion, and I think that has led to a certain level of complacency amongst the population of the United States. Artwork such as “Solidarity with Ukraine” helps to remind us that war will always have civilian casualties. 


Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_is_in_the_Bin 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_with_Balloon 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_with_Ukraine_(Banksy) 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks 






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