Banksy in Toronto
p2pnet view Cool:- Banksy strikes again.
This time in Tarana, from the looks of it.
“At one auction in late 2008 a collection of Banksy’s canvases sold for more than £350,000 ($535,000)”, says the National Post, going on:
“The media has often tried to find out Banksy’s true identity — in 2008, the U.K. newspaper Mail on Sunday claimed his name was Robin Gunningham — though the artist has never revealed it himself.”
Banksy is a “pseudonymous British graffiti artist”, says the Wikipedia, continuing >>>
He is believed to be a native of Yate, South Gloucestershire, near Bristol and to have been born in 1974, but his identity is unknown. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy “was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s.” His artworks are often satirical pieces of art on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencilling technique, is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris and members of the anarcho-punk band Crass who maintained a graffiti stencil campaign on the London Tube System in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His art has appeared in cities around the world. Banksy’s work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.
Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti. Art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.
“Mike was like, ‘Did you see the Banksy mural?’ ” the National Post has Mole saying, “as he snapped photos of the beaver/rat, depicted wearing aviator glasses” on the wall of a boarded-up yellow brick building in Toronto’s Chinatown.
Then “news that Banksy had apparently struck in Toronto raced like wildfire across websites”, says , the story, going on, “a car pulled up and a couple jumped out. A woman in the crowd told the driver, ‘A lot of them are already gone. Trinity [a local park] is gone. Lake Shore is gone’.”
Whaaa?
Banksy murals?
He’d “also apparently struck at Wm. Prager Ltd., on Adelaide Street in Toronto’s historic fashion district, a third-generation manufacturer of retail display cabinets and garment racks”, says the story, adding >>>
When Prager staff went home Friday night, the west wall of the building was blank; they returned yesterday morning to find a life-sized stencil, in black paint, of a man in business attire with a sign around his neck, in red paint, reading: “0% interest in people.”
But the firm had 0% interest in the image. One of the Prager’s shippers found a can of white paint and promptly painted over the work.
“Nobody knew that it was a Bansky,” Joanna Prager explained later. “If you have been the victim of multiple graffiti, it becomes a nuisance. Some people might call it graffiti art and others might consider it vandalism.”
The Pragers are firmly in the “vandalism” camp, although they were shocked by all the attention.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of people who come by,” one staffer said. “It’s like they’re on a treasure hunt or something.”
Mort Prager, the owner, did not regret painting over the work. “So it goes,” he laughed. “We can be known as the ones who erased his graffiti.”
The pix below are from Banksy’s Outdoors site, as is the one in the top right.
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
National Post – Torontonians scour the streets for Banksy’s work, May 11, 2010
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