Central Park (Banksy)

http://www.banksyny.com/2013/10/13/central-park

by badboyboyce • 13 years ago

69 41 13 years ago

icpmacdo• 13 years ago

Lucky for who ever bought one, Im sure they could sell it for 50X what they bought them for.

dh0913• 13 years ago

This article says they each had a market value around $30,000 USD, or 500X. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/banksy-sells-origina...

michaelfdeberry• 13 years ago

That is if they ever find out they own an authentic Banksy piece

quchen• 13 years ago

Very rarely is a picture or painting interesting just by looking at it, but the story behind an image is much harder to sell on the street. As to "people don't recognize art when they see it" type of posts, there are plenty of Banksys out there you've never heard of. In addition to that, what would the appropriate reaction have been according to the poster? People fast-food shopping art at a street corner, like that's any better?

vinceguidry• 13 years ago

Reminds me of that time when Joshua Bell played in a subway with an incredibly expensive violin. They showed people just walking past, not knowing at all what they're missing. When I saw that I thought, "what the hell is he trying to prove?"

You always need to adapt your art to the medium and provide contrast. To do otherwise is to argue against reality. Your average run-of-the-mill street performer is always going to get more attention than Joshua Bell will on the street.

fennecfoxen• 13 years ago

I thought the real lesson of that episode was "most people on the DC metro in the early morning hours are probably commuters in a bit of a rush to get to work on time." Perhaps an evening concert in the same venue would have been more productive...

Rimpinths• 13 years ago

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post set this up and wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning article about it. It's a great article, "Pearls Before Breakfast":

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

Hmm I had heard that the $20/hour or so he made was significantly more than what the average street performer would have gotten though?

So even the commuters in a rush could tell that he was something.

pslam2• 13 years ago

I recall walking through a street of San Francisco (though I can't remember which one - maybe the Haight somewhere) when I saw a big spray-painted piece of art on a wall above the top of a building. I instantly recognized it as being in the style of Banksy. I doubted it at the time because I'm a London expat and it seemed too much of a coincidence to have your "local" artist suddenly turn up in your new neighborhood.

It was only later I looked it up online and found it was actually his work. I'm actually a little surprised that stall at Central Park didn't at least get a few people questioning who the artist was. Perhaps they did, but for brevity the video doesn't show those interactions, because they didn't end up buying anything.

DanBC• 13 years ago

My reaction would have been "wow, that's expensive for a Bansky rip-off" and I would never have thought that Banksy would be selling real banksy's.

abat• 13 years ago

The pieces he sold here look intentionally mediocre. They're just reproductions using stencils he used a while ago on actual buildings. They look much better in their original context. Here they look flat and boring.

Banksy actually does some interesting stuff with paintings (http://imgur.com/S3CTKip) that's better than just using his old stencils on white canvases. My guess is he wanted these canvases to look like someone did the bare minimum to copy his most iconic stencils and make money off of Banksy's fame.

That said I would have liked to have bought one even if the real art is the entire performance and not the individual canvases being sold.

iamben• 13 years ago

I think you're right - these look exactly like the Banksy 'reproductions' that are sold in high street poster stores up and down the UK. Most of them looked like a 30 second version of stencils / originals / prints that were released a long time ago.

I think that most people who knew who Banksy was prior to this probably would have looked, laughed and walked on. As for the guy who bought 4 of them for the walls of his new house - he can probably pay off a fair whack of his mortgage!

Over the last few years I'd imagine Banksy's made a fair few unsuspecting people a significant chunk of change... Good on him :-)

perchard• 13 years ago

Perhaps Columbus and Broadway: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilvia/5140456220/

pslam2• 13 years ago

Yes, that's the one - thanks! Not the Haight at all, but apparently there's at least 2 others along Haight, for a total of about 6 in the city.

holycrap• 13 years ago

It all makes sense now: That man is Banksy!

jaredstenquist• 13 years ago

This is one of my favorite Banksy works. It was a block over from my last office. Unfortunately it was defaced by some other graffiti artists. Ironic

http://www.highsnobiety.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/...

alwaysinshade• 13 years ago

Ironic

It's zero-day art. The people who try to preserve it by bolting glass plates over the top are missing the point.

tehwebguy• 13 years ago

Probably meant ironic because of the nature of the specific art piece: a man pasting a "Cancelled" sign over some fake graffiti that says "Follow your dreams"

spinlock• 13 years ago

Was that guy Banksy? I thought he never let himself be photographed without a disguise?

My favorite Banksy was outside of Galapagos when it was in Williamsburg. I loved walking by it until Splatter destroyed it.

Now, I'm actually in NYC for Comicon and I find out that Banksy was in Central Park .... I'm so sad now.

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

The guy shown is too old to be Banksy, but I wouldn't be that surprised if it were him in makeup ala Johnny Knoxville when he gets made up as Irving Zisman. The "old man" mannerisms were laid on pretty thick.

nrivadeneira3• 13 years ago

I don't think it was Banksy. Most likely just a guy Banksy hired to sell the pieces.

norswap• 13 years ago

I love that I get the feeling there is a message that wants to get out of the experiment, but that it isn't explicitly stated.

Zoepfli• 13 years ago

Yes, and that message is "art is as much about the object itself as it is about its sociological context."

Put something into a museum and everybody will look at it reverently. Sell it on the street and most will ignore it. Sad. But human.

grinich• 13 years ago

The famous violinist Joshua Bell once played in a DC metro station for nearly an hour. He played six Bach pieces (some of the hardest ever composed) on a $3.5MM violin. Over a thousand people rushed by, unperturbed. He made $32 and some change.

I still don't know how this makes me feel. You can say it's human to ignore things on the street, but there were more children who stopped than adults.

I think it's moreso that the older we get, the less we trust our emotions. We're scared to have an original opinion, or go against the grain. We let the responsibilities of life take over-- it's easier than reflecting on who you are and how things feel. We don't want to get in trouble, don't want to be late for work, don't want people to laugh at us, don't want to feel alone.

I wish I knew how to fix this in the world. I think we're missing out on a lot.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

jberryman• 13 years ago

Another conclusion you could draw is that when you remove the hype Banksy's work just isn't very compelling (anymore, or perhaps just on canvas). Or perhaps this is evidence of the opposite: a fair number of people were willing to pay $60 for a small monochrome, hastily-sprayed stencil piece.

vacri2• 13 years ago

In this case, not sad at all. As abat says above, these pieces look flat and boring. Usually Banksy's work melds with the environment it's in, often in clever ways. Taken out of that environment, it's just stencil art. The special essence has left, and it does become boring.

flylib• 13 years ago

unbelievable Banksys best piece of work yet

asd111• 13 years ago

Colbert is trying to get some Banksy art on his studio http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/42957...

shapiro• 13 years ago

Banksy is just the remainder of an unbalanced equation in the matrix. Marketing has triumphed over Art. The rebel artist is an anomaly, but it is not unexpected. Which has led you, inexorably, here.

Central Park (Banksy)

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