The whole phenomenon of urban art, as Stefano Antonelli and Gianluca Marziani explain, is connected to criticizing the aesthetics of this consumer capitalism. But for the anonymous artist from Bristol, the reconquest of spaces manu pictoris becomes systematic and antagonistic, going against all mediation. If we read Banksy’s texts, which are of such great importance for comprehending his political art, we are struck by their absolute harmony not only with Klein’s narrative, but with the everyday interpretation—from the building of the wall on the West Bank to the proliferating climate crisis, and onto the collapse of healthcare systems overwhelmed by the recent pandemic and by the fierce wars in recent months—of a viewpoint of criticism against the time’s dominant powers. The twentieth-century Left, which ran its course in Florence on 20 November 1999, is like a little point fading in the distance. There is a new magma, doubtlessly with values of the Left, but wholly alternative to the intermediate bodies built by the social Left of the last century—including in those of art and culture. One cannot fail to see that both the spread of museum systems and the new art market that expanded beyond belief in the second half of the twentieth century and in this first fifth of the twenty-first, belong to this history to a great degree. As Banksy writes: “The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have a real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at a trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.” It is this immediacy—in/mediacy, if you will—that gives power to the Banksian aesthetic. The weapons are stencil and brush, the setting, the nighttime, the theatre, and the urban crisis, with episodes in museums and “elevated” places: the armed struggle of signs and colors. This revolution without bloodletting establishes a new artistic populism— against critics, mediators, galleries and museums, against those who set the prices of an art accessible only to the wealthy, a true status symbol of the capitalism of logos. Some great artists have themselves become brands, starting with Andy Warhol, the brilliant accomplice and critic of the world of advertising and image. Pop Art is the parent of Street Art, but the latter is a rebellious child, a runaway, cross-pollinating first with rap, with street music, and then onto trap music of recent years. The parent is inside the system, in fact exalting their own intermediate bodies. The child criticizes them. And the grandchildren like Banksy counter this system with their strength. They produce artworks, signs, immediately comprehensible messages, all derived from the imagery of
Barcode 2004 Silkscreen print
advertising, comics, or information. But they immediately raise questions of “why.” They produce critical thought and they raise reflection: not only in the well-to-do person admiring the artwork in his or her living room, but in the worker going to work, their grandparent going shopping, the student going to school. The fundamental “why” is the revelation of what is true and what is false. The gigantic campaign of “fakeness” that produces brandocracy every day legitimates the force of a conceptual overturning. This is to be investigated in Banksy. After the anthropocentric break of the Renaissance, Caravaggio disclosed the revealed truth of art deposited in the Holy Scriptures and in religion, and, during the time of the Counter-Reformation, gave the Madonna on her deathbed the face of a sex worker drowned in the Tiber and immortalized cheats and murderers as new princes of reality. In the same way, Banksy demystifies the great aesthetic construction of advertising and the market of the second half of the twentieth century. He makes it his own, he knows its codes and paradigms, he overturns it. In some way, this phenomenon— which we call artistic populism—accompanies a trend in this phase, inherent to all national democracies and to the global brandocracy. There is an affinity between this artistic insurgency—in which the prominent figures are young people who have worked in design and advertising—and the crisis of the old mass parties. Populism in any context is typically a transitory phenomenon. Antonio Gramsci, in a note in his Prison Notebooks of 1930, wrote: “the crisis precisely consists in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms 26
appear.” This is a very current reflection. Populism expresses the crisis of the old order. But for this crisis not to lead to tragic consequences as took place a hundred years ago, to wholly new morbid phenomena, a change is needed. In her last paper, Klein expanded her gaze to the environment (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate). And in a certain way, the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future—with all the abilities, typical of these times, to build herself as a brand—confirms this direction. And in other ways, this is not unlike the neofeminist direction advocated by the Me Too movement. The Bristol artist is also on this road, and I am convinced we will find him at all the crossroads in a new thinking of criticism and change. Of course, to do this, Banksy himself becomes a system—not only in order to market his works; not only due to the authentications (his) Pest Control company gives to the works on the market; not only due to the Girl with Balloon shredded at auction; and not only due to the temporary outlet opened in London with his merchandising. But because the years go by; value increases; the perception Banksy has of himself changes. One would hope that it will not be institutionalized, that he will be able to maintain his rebellious,
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unconventional spirit materializing the new trends of today and not just capitalizing his criticisms of yesterday. We shall see. What is certain is that he is an artist who has swiftly conquered the global stage at a time of great crisis and of great transition. Capitalist realism is therefore the thought that springs from the “pessimism of the intellect,” as Gramsci taught us. The “optimism of the will” takes the shape of that “there is always hope” that Banksy wrote beside Girl with Balloon, painted in 2002 on the South Bank stairs of London’s Waterloo Bridge. Fisher tries to give words to this hope. “The goal of a genuinely new left,” he writes in the final pages of Capitalist Realism, “should not be to take over the state but to subordinate the state to the general will.” But what is the general will? Resuscitating the concept of it means reviving and modernizing “the idea of a public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of individuals and their interests.” Let us liberate, then, and let us—not only with the brush or with musical notes—conquer the new public space.
