The New Yorker did an exposé on Banksy, the London based graffiti artist. I always thought the appeal of underground art was that it was underground. The power of the internet has made underground artists/designers/brands explode.
Anyway, I like The New Yorker. Sometimes Sasha-Frere Jones will do a review on new hip hop albums. It’s weird to see those in that uppity literary journal. Here’s the goddamned article:
Banksy Was Here
The invisible man of graffiti art.
by Lauren Collins May 14, 2007
The British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. For a while now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch, then in Hoxton. Joel Unangst, who had the nearly unprecedented experience of meeting Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When Unangst is asked what adorns the T-shirts, he will allow, before fretting that he has revealed too much already, that they are covered with smudges of white paint.
Continue reading ‘Destroying the allure of “Underground”’
Recent Comments