Sunday, September 25, 2011

telling you something


... though what might be being communicated is hard to tell.   The walls and surfaces around the Silver Lake reservoir were a great source of street art ephemera today, and hence extremely restorative in what was an afternoon free of Official Commitments - fun (and intellectually rewarding) though those commitments have been this week.   This is in sub-Banksy style, and also is faintly redolent of the early 60s: I guess we're about to hear a lot more about this period, given that today's NYT had a fake Pan-Am luggage label, advertising the new TV shows based on Pan Am in its heyday.    Some of us remember Pan Am very well indeed - it is, after all, only 20 years since it financially went under - and it's unnerving having such recent history marketed as nostalgia.   

I think I'll let Banksy speak for this style (quoted in the catalog to MOCA's 2011 Art in the Streets exhibition catalog, p. 246.   Not that this page - or a whole lot of other pages - is numbered - a mild, diluted act of subversion to match the art that the volume records?   "I prefer to paint on the streets than in a museum," Banksy says, "because if you exhibit in a gallery you have to compete against a Rembrandt, but if you paint down an alley you only have to compete against a trash can.   I guess it's the equivalent of hanging around with fat people to make yourself look thin."

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