Banksy Does New York Page #4

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art dealers, art connoisseurs

would never travel to.

This is public art,

public space for anyone to come

and to experience and to enjoy together.

My name's Andrew russeth,

and I'm an art critic

for the New York observer.

We didn't write a ton about it...

I think almost...

Probably almost nothing...

Just because we think of our audience

as kind of the traditional, I guess,

contemporary fine-art world,

which banksy has kind of like

made a point of avoiding,

and the contemporary art world

has, for the most part,

kind of avoided him.

I just think a lot of banksy,

a lot of street art

is just so kitschy, so silly,

so, in a way, just dumb.

It's just art that kind of like

hits you over the head

with its message, its point.

And, you know, I think...

I'm at least interested in stuff

that has some nuance, some subtlety,

like, makes you feel weird

and think weird things.

And banksy is just the worst,

lowest-common-denominator art.

The one that I think

everyone kind of liked...

It was the moving truck

with the animals

all flailing about inside.

Anw Bo ke ko yan

anw Bo ke ko yan

djama

Sabali, sabali,

sabali yonkonte

sabali, sabali, sabali kayi

ni kera mogo fe sabali yonkonte

ni kera tie fe sabali yonkonte

ni kera mousso fe sabali yonkonte

wo, ouh, wo, sabali,

sabali, sabali kagni

We found it!

You have to follow it till it stops.

Yeah, you can hear it and everything.

Cherie, je m'adresse toi.

Avec toi, cherie, la vie est belle.

La-la la-la la-la avec toi, cherie

wo, ouh, wo, la-la la-la la-la

ca c'est pour la vie

You have nothing to worry about.

Are you sure you got enough?

So many people I knew were really...

Were, you know, kind of tormented

that they missed this opportunity,

and I'm like,

"do you really want to own

a banksy that badly?"

And they're like, "no,

I want to get a banksy for 60 bucks."

And so it kind of plays

into that fantasy people have

of, like, going to a thrift store

and buying a painting,

and then a piece chips off

and you see

there's a painting underneath,

and you discover, like, a lost Da Vinci.

It's the last bit of dreaming

we have left in a culture

which promised the American dream.

We're at the new banksky.

At the new banksky.

- They're taking pictures of it.

- They are.

Okay, right behind

this blue guy, right there.

What you see before you

is a sculpture entitled "shoeshine,"

dating from the summer of 2013,

depicting the powerful figure of

Ronald McDonald

waiting impassively

as his ridiculously

oversized clown shoes

are buffed to a fine shine.

Ronald was adopted

as the official mascot

of the McDonald's fast-food

corporation chain in 1966.

Fiberglass versions of his likeness

have been installed

outside restaurants ever since,

thus making Ronald arguably

the most sculpted figure

in history, after Christ.

Ooh!

For this piece, the artist

has reproduced Ronald McDonald

in perfect detail,

single-handedly...

Ah!

...if by "perfect detail"

you mean "awfully"

and by "single-handedly" you mean

with two people helping.

Aw!

But take a closer look,

and you may notice something

familiar about this clown.

His face is that

of the Greek god hermes,

carved by praxiteles in 340 b. C.

Is this a wry, oblique reference

to Greek mythology?

Or did the artist

have such difficulty

trying to sculpt the face,

he simply plonked on the nearest

replica bust he could find?

We will never know.

It's the second one.

NYPD is hot on his trail,

saying what he is doing

around the five boroughs

is vandalism.

No one knows who he is

or what he looks like,

even though he's been

around for quite some time.

16 have been painted so far.

The NYPD is calling "bansky" a vandal,

vowing to arrest the artist

if he is caught.

While I don't support

the public defacing of,

you know, buildings, I'm...

I'm very intrigued.

Police are still trying

to track this guy down.

We're so close to kind of getting

a glimpse of maybe who he is.

Police department's stance

on the art is,

graffiti is graffiti, and it is illegal.

Banksy has many fans,

but don't count mayor bloomberg

among them.

Graffiti does ruin people's property

and is a sign of decay

and loss of control.

And you running up

to somebody's property

or public property and defacing it

is not my definition of art.

Well, it's funny 'cause, I mean,

bloomberg's been so proactive

with public art.

But, you know, it should be sanctioned.

It should be commissioned.

In the '70s and '80s,

it was so prevalent,

and it sort of became associated

in the new yorkers' minds with blight.

It became associated with crime.

Each of these cost us

$1 million in a sense

because others went out

and tried to copy.

Is it worth it?

Well, it is one of the quality

of life offenses,

and you can't just take one of

those quality of life offenses.

It's like three-card monte

and pickpocketing

and shoplifting

and graffiti defacing

our public and private walls.

I mean, look, the law is the law,

and you're not allowed to deface

someone else's property

without their permission.

You know, at the same time,

there's no doubt that the way

people experience the city is...

Their interests are perked

by seeing kind of a wall in a new way.

The twist in the banksy story

is that when he vandalizes

your property,

its value goes up instead of going down.

I wish I can meet him

in person to congratulate him

because he's getting paint

on my building.

I'm a real-estate developer in Brooklyn,

and we're putting street art and murals

on all of our projects.

It's a wonderful amenity

for our tenants,

and it creates a vibrant

neighborhood and street-scape.

You know, so, they've worked so hard

to get it off the subways,

and now I go on the subways,

and it's one big ad.

It's sort of like, "oh, great."

You know,

it's all this privatization

of public space.

"Graffiti free NYC."

So, this is what they want, eh?

Mm-hmm.

Excuse me.

Two days ago, it was an old man.

You know what I mean?

What was it, though?

Two women on top of a bridge.

- Huh?

- two women on top of a bridge.

- Did it.

- We found him.

We found it.

They did?

What did they do?

They smeared all over.

- Really?

- mm-hmm.

- Yeah.

- that guy...

He tagged over that piece

probably five minutes

before I got there.

Like, I was walking

around the williamsburg area

looking for that piece

and checking Instagram at the same time.

Like, "oh, man, this guy

just painted over

the geisha paintings, da da da da."

Don't f*** up.

Your life's at stake.

Don't blow it, guys.

There were this collaborative

group called the wet wipe gang.

We ride around, and we wipe.

We ride around, and we wipe.

They would go after a banksy

had been tampered with.

They would go in and try and restore it.

So, there is sort of this altruistic,

you know, like, Robin hood do-goodery

that was taking place, too.

I've been following since day one.

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