Review: Banksy Retrospective

My wife is a big fan of street artist Banksy, so when she discovered there was going to be a retrospective of his work called “Banksy: Genius or Vandal”—literally just around the corner from us—she got tickets. The show was mounted in a pop up gallery in a leased space at an industrial business park area nearby that felt very fitting for the exhibition.

Though I’m not an expert on the artist, Banksy’s seems to bridge the worlds of graffiti and street art, performance art, political activism, and the contemporary fine art market. Keeping his real identity secret gives him the cover for taking a guerrilla approach to “installing” his art in public and private spaces surreptitiously and without permission (that are often subsequently dismissed as vandalism). I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about Banksy, partly because his radicalism often feels as much like clever attention-grabbing marketing and branding as it does “art.”

That said, the show gave me an appreciation for the breadth of his work as well as his irreverence, playful dark humor, and political bent. In addition to graffiti and street art, he has been involved in larger installations like a rundown theme park called Dismaland and the creation of the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem that marked the 100th anniversary of the British control of Palestine, both of which involved other artists. The exhibition even provided historical context for the long tradition of street and protest art and graffiti dating as far back as Roman times and the Renaissance to the present (which made me think of that scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where Brian paints “Romans Go Home” on ancient city walls).

Since much of his work is transient and considered temporary, much of it has been painted over, cut out for preservation by galleries, or stolen outright. As noted in the exhibition, one private home that went up for sale with a Banksy mural on its side was offered as a Banksy mural with a house attached. Another infamous incident involved a piece sold at auction that was shredded by remote control a few minutes after it sold, while still hanging on the wall, with a shredder that had been secretly built into the frame in anticipation for this very moment—the buyer agreed to honor the purchase, presumably recognizing that the prank had actually increased the value of the piece.

Much of the exhibition also made extensive use of multimedia, including video and projected images—a highlight at the end of the exhibition was a 3D VR “ride” available to visitors (for a small extra fee) that takes viewers through a digital urban landscape where Banksy’s art, much of it animated, is display on the virtual buildings and structures around you.

Afterwards, we noticed the show was billed as an “unauthorized exhibition”—I’m not sure whether art exhibitions are normally “authorized” regardless, but I guess the exhibition wished to make clear that the artist did not participate.

In any case, it was a well done and informative retrospective—it’s in L.A. through the end of the month and it looks like it will be traveling to New York soon. For details, see https://banksyexpo.com/.

Below are additional photos from the exhibition. Click here to see the full photo gallery.