{"id":652522,"date":"2026-05-06T04:09:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T04:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/652522\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T04:09:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T04:09:10","slug":"banksys-art-for-the-lanyard-classes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/652522\/","title":{"rendered":"Banksy\u2019s art for the lanyard classes"},"content":{"rendered":"

At times such as these, of extreme social disorientation and moral fragmentation, the public cries out for meaning, commonality, a light in the dark. Well bad luck, public, because what you get is another Banksy.<\/p>\n

Banksy, the world\u2019s best-known anonymous artist, has seen fit to gift the world another piece of art, in this case a sculpture. It depicts a suited man carrying an oversized flag, the flag obscuring the man\u2019s vision as he is about to march, blinded, off the statue\u2019s supporting plinth.<\/p>\n

The statue appeared overnight on Wednesday in Waterloo Place in the St James\u2019s district of Westminster \u2013 a street, as the BBC helpfully explains, \u2018designed to celebrate imperialism and military dominance in the 1800s\u2019.<\/p>\n

What could it all mean? Well, if Banksy has a skill at all, it is in being sledgehammer-obvious.<\/p>\n

Being obvious \u2013 making things people understand \u2013 is surprisingly difficult. But where being obvious takes real talent is in making difficult ideas accessible. Banksy does not do this. Banksy takes easy ideas and reveals, through heavy-handed metaphors, just how breathtakingly obvious they are.<\/p>\n

The badness of Banksy\u2019s art<\/a> is not a bug but a feature. It is designed to go down nice and easy, to be as inclusive and non-threatening as humanly possible. Its trick is to unite people around a lowest-common-denominator premise while convincing them that they are razor-sharp semiologists who can deconstruct the floating chain of signs and signifiers. Banksy flatters mediocre thinkers that they are the in crowd, and smarter than the next guy.<\/p>\n

Enjoying spiked?<\/p>\n

Why not make an instant, one-off donation?<\/p>\n

We are funded by you. Thank you!<\/p>\n

\n \u00a35
\n \u00a310
\n \u00a320
\n \u00a350\n <\/p>\n

Choose an amount<\/p>\n

\n Donate now\n <\/p>\n

\n Please wait… <\/p>\n

As a sculptor, Banksy wears his artistic heritage lightly. Not for Banksy the subtle homoerotic contrapposto of a Michelangelo, nor the witty repurposing of objects \u00e0 la Picasso, nor even the brute scale and tension of a Richard Serra. Rather, Banksy takes the aesthetics of mass-produced garden-centre ornaments and fills them with the moral complexity of a Catchphrase clue. Roy Walker\u2019s gentle encouragement to nervous game-show contestants, \u2018Say what you see!\u2019, is also the best way of unlocking the meaning of a Banksy.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say what we see in Banksy\u2019s latest. We are so blinded by nationalism that we risk putting ourselves in danger. Jackpot! An idea so facile it barely merits the resin it took to cast the statue.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Banksy\u2019s art fulfils an important social function, which is to reassure worried, like-minded people that they are not alone. In this case, people who feel that strong national sentiment is misguided and dangerous \u2013 and there are plenty of them \u2013 can take comfort that this is a legitimate feeling. Banksy\u2019s gift to them is to remove any iota of thought that might cloud the issue, any possibility of uncomfortable doubt.<\/p>\n

Banksy skillfully avoids any chance of misunderstanding through the location of the statue and the timing of its deployment. St James\u2019s \u2013 establishment, militarism, yeah? \u2013 in the run-up to the local elections, because politics, yeah? There is on the nose, and there is Banksy.<\/p>\n

And if you are worried that a hefty, spontaneous and unauthorised statue could be a form of vandalism, don\u2019t be. There is certainly no risk of the authorities seeing it that way. Westminster City Council has already given the statue its unofficial blessing<\/a>, with a spokesperson telling the BBC: \u2018We\u2019re excited to see Banksy\u2019s latest sculpture in Westminster, making a striking addition to the city\u2019s vibrant public art scene.\u2019 Truly, as an act of subversion, the stakes could not be lower.<\/p>\n

Banksy\u2019s art is dissent for the lanyard classes. It is a way of turning their own contempt for the working classes, and working-class values such as patriotism, into something less obviously judgemental, ugly and upsetting to their own psychic health. Disdain becomes sophistication, and snobbery a self-contained culture. In an age of virtue-signalling, Banksy\u2019s success lies in making both the virtue and the signal gobsmackingly explicit.<\/p>\n

Alex Dale is a designer based in London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At times such as these, of extreme social disorientation and moral fragmentation, the public cries out for meaning,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652523,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[35906,449,458,459,64,63,460,134,2022],"class_list":["post-652522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-london"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652522\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}