Comment by arduanika
12 hours ago
> the fact that the flag is unadorned (which/whose flag is it?), and the man is unknown, makes me think this statue could be the ultimate Rorschach test
This is part of what's obvious. The whole thing, including this oooh aahh Rorschach part, is obvious. It's thoughts that we all had in high school, and it is hack.
Lol, right now this comment declaring "the oooh aahh Rorschach part is obvious" is literally just below another comment declaring that the sculpture could only reasonably be interpreted as being anti-nationalist. So thanks for proving my point.
That just means you're both wrong. "Its location - Waterloo Place, St James's - is an area designed to celebrate imperialism and military dominance in the 1800s", says the BBC. Banksy is from Bristol, where they threw a statue of a slave-trading philanthropist in the river. The statue is wearing a suit. It's not very interpretable. We can wonder whether it's about the Conservative party or the Reform party, but nobody's suggesting it represents Hamas or the CCP.
※ I admit that Xi Jinping wears a suit, but I'm still classifying that theory under "plausible deniability".
And yet here here we all are taking about it. Art is about inciting a response, and he’s done it. Whether we think he’s a hack or not is irrelevant - he has the world’s attention.
Where does the "art is about inciting a response" theory originate from?
I went and looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_art but couldn't find it there. The "anti-essentialist" section is good, though, I think. It has Berys Gaut listing ten properties of art, all of which are nice-to-have but none of which are essential. Then if a piece ticks lots of boxes it's a shoo-in, but if it doesn't tick many of them you can argue about it.
Some of those involve eliciting some sort of response, but you could also have a decorative piece with this combo:
(i) aesthetic, (iv) complex, (v) meaningful, (vi) idiosyncratic, (vii) imaginative, (viii) skillful, (ix) art-shaped, (x) intentional
Which would be 8 out of 10, to which we could add "completely ignorable" and it could still be art. I don't see why attention-grabbing and provocation is important, and it certainly isn't sufficient on its own, plus it's irritating.
Gp said, "it's a hack"
You said, "Whether we think he's a hack", which fundamentally changes what is being discussed.
The only reason we're talking about this is because of Banksy. Not because it is a clever or "deep" piece. It's disappointingly surface level, and the fact that we're talking about that doesn't suggest otherwise.
> The only reason we're talking about this is because of Banksy.
Baloney. It's a guerilla sculpture put up in the center of London. My guess is we might be talking about it more if it were unsigned as a case of whodunnit.
But for me personally, I roll my eyes at all the ex-art students who always complain "it's a hack" for any piece of art that appeals to a wide audience and isn't some obnoxious 8-layers deep meaning. You literally see it all the time, and half the time it just strikes me as thinly-veiled jealousy, if not from the art student perspective than from the "I'm so much more sophisticated than the unwashed masses" perspective.
It happened on HN a few months ago in a post about Simon Berger, an artist who makes portraits with cracked glass. The artist has achieved relatively wide appeal, and many of the comments here were along the lines of "Meh, he's a talentless hack, he just stumbled along a 'cool' technique but the subjects are boring."
I'd have a lot more respect for folks that could just say "it's not my bag" and move on, rather than pretend they're so much more sophisticated than people who enjoy this art.