Banksy Dismaland Show Revealed at Weston's Tropicana

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-33999495

by kurren • 11 years ago

207 79 11 years ago

chrisBob2• 11 years ago

Anyone interested in Banksy but doesn't know much about him? Check out "Exit Through the Gift Shop". About half way through it turns into the most hilarious documentary I have ever seen.

serg_chernata3• 11 years ago

There's also a great documentary on HBO that follows Banksy's residency in NY.

stefantalpalaru• 11 years ago

That one's a bit sad because it shows the local taggers defacing his stencils shortly after they are in place.

owenfi• 11 years ago

Not a great one for a first day with someone you barely know (no movies at all on a first date, I know, I was young!) or maybe it is great if you want to weed out uninteresting people.

chrisBob2• 11 years ago

The start is a little slow. I had a friend get board and turn it off before getting to the best part. Maybe you just found someone with a short attention span.

uxcn3• 11 years ago

The comparison to Andy Warhol was fairly appropriate.

BillTheCat• 11 years ago

It's funny how commercial Banksy's art has become. People track down his art, rip it out of walls and sell it for millions of dollars to the very people that the art is mocking.

I like what Max Tempkin said in regards to selling people literal crap for $6 a piece: "... [T]here's no protesting capitalism. There's nothing you can say about capitalism that it won't subsume and sell back to you." [1]

[1] http://blog.maxistentialism.com/post/105481561063/

serg_chernata3• 11 years ago

Actually, an interesting bit of information on the topic of selling Banksy's art. The HBO documentary I mentioned concludes with a statement that while several of NY Residency pieces are up for sale none have sold to date. I don;t know if they have between then and now however.

kaolinite• 11 years ago

My favourite story on a similar note is how a Marc Jacob's boutique was vandalised a few years ago. The vandal spray painted "ART" across the front of the store. Marc Jacobs responded by photographing it and putting it on a teeshirt and selling it for $700.

http://www.huhmagazine.co.uk/3721/art-by-art-jacobs-t-shirt

qq662• 11 years ago

Mind-boggling to think about, but could the vandal assert copyright over the spray painted wordmark?

collyw2• 11 years ago

The more I read about stuff like this the more I am convinced that most modern art is just pretentious crap.

Joeboy• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_%28politics%29

analog31• 11 years ago

In Hans Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art, he noted the unexpected commercial success of Dadaist art. The best that I can remember the quote, he said: They expected people to react with shock, and to open their minds. Instead, people reacted with amusement, and opened their wallets.

SonicSoul• 11 years ago

I disagree I'm sure some people want his art enough to open their big wallets but that should not detract from others who's minds were actually opened, and whom I believe to be the majority

uxcn3• 11 years ago

http://www.villagevoice.com/music/updated-jay-zs-occupy-all-...

pparkkin• 11 years ago

There's a term for this: recuperation[1]. The opposite of which is détournement[2].

Banksy's art seems to me to be a good example of the dialectic between the two.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tournement

riffraff3• 11 years ago

FWIW, literal crap has been "artified" and commercialized more than half a century ago[0]

A tin [of shit] was sold for €124,000 at Sotheby's on May 23, 2007

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit

msoad2• 11 years ago

How Banksy still is anonymous with all this?

If you don't know him, checkout his website: http://banksy.co.uk/

P.S: It's known that it's a "he". That's why I used "he" and "his"

misiti3780• 11 years ago

one of the UK papers figured out who he was a few years ago. i know he didnt officially admit it but if you read this article it is pretty clear they actually did track him down (in my opinion anyways)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1034538/Graffiti-a...

WaxProlix2• 11 years ago

Not a lot of credibility to the daily mail; it could be right, but they just outright make shit up sometimes. It's basically a tabloid.

subdane• 11 years ago

Is Banksy Damien Hirst? http://www.streetsworth.com/2013/11/is-damien-hirst-behind-b...

modfodder• 11 years ago

Is Banksy a he?

http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/11/why-banksy-is-probably...

I prefer the theory that it's a collective of artists lead by a woman.

msoad2• 11 years ago

That could be true. I saw a series of photos of person "implementing" the art that was a guy.

iamben• 11 years ago

Anecdotally - I've met a few people that have known or worked with him over the last 12 or so years. Definitely a him.

werber• 11 years ago

Looks cool, but god damn it's redundant.

Brakenshire• 11 years ago

Definitely redundant. But to be fair if marketing/advertising/campaigning bludgeons the point home (Eat such and such fast food and have a happy relationship with your children! Buy such and such clothes and have a sexy girlfriend! Have you absorbed this political talking point yet!?) it's only fair that people speaking against that are allowed the same license to labour the point to the edge of boredom and despair.

wmeredith• 11 years ago

How else would one fight the banality of evil?

Sven72• 11 years ago

I don't know. Seems a bit timely.

Bob Iger of Disney this week has said, that they are at a point with their content/merch/theme parks etc able to "burn out" the entire consuming population of the country if they wanted too...

Imagine what that overoptimized machine can do in a few years from now.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

Maybe Bob should just Let It Go.

riffraff3• 11 years ago

forgive my question, but what does "burn out" the consuming population actually mean?

Also, where is this interview? I'd love to read it :)

dankohn1• 11 years ago

If you're not already familiar with Banksy, this is my favorite piece from his New York residency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX54DIpacNE

And here is where the Simpsons had Banksy design their opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX1iplQQJTo

sprkyco• 11 years ago

Really wish he would pull something like this stateside at Lake Dolores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Dolores_Waterpark

chestnut-tree• 11 years ago

The UK's Channel 4 News has a good video report on Dismaland here (approx 6 mins):

Dismaland: inside Banksy’s dystopian playground

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wruEnynr1w

hristov• 11 years ago

Cool. If he moves this to america I would love to apply for a job as a pissed off usher.

dismal2• 11 years ago

Hasn't this already been covered on this season of Bojack Horseman?

zemanel2• 11 years ago

I worked in Bristol between last and this year. Sometime around August maybe last year on a Monday morning, as i was having a work break outside the building, i looked over the corner and a new Bansky was on the wall (girl with the earing). In the afternoon, a wave of admirers was already rolling in. By tuesday, someone had already dafaced the piece, by splashing black ink over some parts of it.

jkestner• 11 years ago

I guess I'd prefer the defacement to the aforementioned chopping off to turn into sellable art.

zemanel2• 11 years ago

I think that in the end it may not matter; if i had to classify "real" art and was thinking clearly, i'd say "real" art is the message that the piece carries, as the piece itself is just wood, stone, ink or whatever, can be defaced, taken off a wall and sold to a rich guy's living room wall whereas the message is intangible.

So i guess censorship would actually be the worst case.

Ps. This line of thought relates to some of the other comments in these threads ("... [T]here's no protesting capitalism. There's nothing you can say about capitalism that it won't subsume and sell back to you." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10093768)

qq662• 11 years ago

Interesting to see how well-made some of these pieces are. The overturned horse and the killer whale look very high quality. I wonder how Banksy produces these and maintains his or her anonymity, as the pieces look like they are the work of large teams of professionals.

riffraff3• 11 years ago

I think it's been definitely shown he actually has (is?) a large team of professionals, if you watch "exit through the gift shop" you will see the setup for some of the works which uses many different people.

kzhahou• 11 years ago

Absolutely beautiful work. Love it.

At the same time, though, as a commentary by the acclaimed Banksy, isn't "Disneyland is over-commercialized hell" a cliched theme at this point?

antod• 11 years ago

I'm no art critic, but I suspect Disneylands commercialism is not the target of the commentary at all (more likely the direction of modern society or 21st century Britain or something like that), it is just the physical manifestation or visual theme of that commentary.

A bit like how the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man is not really a deity, but the physical manifestation of Gozer the Gozerian. You miss the point somewhat if you concentrate on the marshmellow.

chad_strategic• 11 years ago

Well played, Mr. Banksy, well played. (golf clap)

dang• 11 years ago

There's also http://hyperallergic.com/231114/banksys-new-apocalyptic-them..., which might be a bit more substantive. via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10095509.

ctrijueque• 11 years ago

Two other links with photos and a excerpt of an interview with Banksy about the park.

http://www.juxtapoz.com/current/preview-inside-banksy-s-dism...

http://www.juxtapoz.com/current/october-2015-banksy-s-dismal...

petercooper3• 11 years ago

The point I've taken away from Dismaland is how most theme parks are already Dismaland.

Think of what would make for an awful theme park: high price to enter, long queues everywhere, screaming kids, highly priced low quality food, security checks, a constant push to buy crap.. that's already what we allow to pass as a theme park, yet people willingly sign up to enter.

andy_ppp• 11 years ago

Things really are getting worse for most people now. Something that maybe we aren't used to as technologists in our little bubbles away from the rest of the economy.

Dismaland is not even satire, it's a reflection of what is really happening as the rich try to prop up a system that looks like its about to fail again... buy gold and bitcoin.

Banksy Dismaland Show Revealed at Weston's Tropicana

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