I have no words for how cool I think Anthill Art is. And animal lover I may be, these are nonetheless some creatures that are a creepy-crawly bane of my existence. So if a few colonies are wiped out in the name of art, I’m good with that. Could even snowball into the artful removal of lots and lots of colonies, hallelujah, if we all do our part and buy.
Still not convinced? Feast your eyes then on the making of Anthill Art, then, and you will be:
It’s painfully clear now that Detroit’s iconic Heidelberg Project is under attack. The storied grass-roots art park suffered it’s eighth arson attack in seven months on Sunday, December 7th, resulting in the destruction of the Elba Street Clock House. Three other Heidelberg Houses were destroyed by fire earlier in the year. Only three undamaged Houses now remain.
In the latest attack, the arsonist seems to have struck just minutes before a night watchman arrived for duty. Detroit authorities and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are now recognizing the premeditated, serial nature of the crimes. ATF is offering a $5,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest.
It’s easy, maybe too easy, to feel rage and frustration over the senseless nihilism that’s robbing Detroit, and the world, of these treasures. But let’s try to take solace in the message from the Heidelberg Project itself: They won’t stop. Art is perishable, to be sure. And as these tragedies prove, it’s all too vulnerable. But the artistic spirit? That’s invincible.
No new info yet, but energy is high. If you know HP history, you know we won’t give in. THANK YOU for standing with us! #ChallengeAccepted
— Heidelberg Project (@HeidelbergProj) December 9, 2013
Some might have doubted whether the economic value of the creative arts could ever be quantified. Many others probably preferred that they wouldn’t be. Arts and culture are ethereal; economics are the opposite of that. There was never supposed to be common ground.
But if you look for it, you can always find common ground. And as of today, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the National Endowment for the Arts have done just that.
Their joint study, examining data up through 2011, pegs the value of “arts and cultural production” (ACP) at 3.2 percent of the United States’ post-recession GDP, or $504 billion. Even with the noticeable fall-off in the aftermath of the 2007 Great Recession, the arts-and-culture sector still accounts for enormous economic growth, millions of jobs, and hundreds of millions of dollars in domestic wages.
This should come as a wake-up call to the anti-culture forces, who question every arts-related endowment and who have always insisted that investment in creative production is wasted money. And likewise, it should 
be a wake-up call for the cultural purists, who sneer at the idea of applying hard-science analysis to artistic endeavors.
The data speaks. It shows both groups are wrong. It proves that yes, the impact of art can be quantified, if only in a limited, mercantilist sphere. And it proves that on those terms, the arts are not only valuable, but are an irreplaceable contributor to economic growth.
If you already believed that arts and culture can and should be central to civilization, then you probably didn’t need any economic proofs. And if you believed that culture is corrosive, and that art not to your liking is immoral or worse, then no charts or graphs are going to soften your stance.
But somewhere in the middle is the vast majority of us. We have open minds and a faith in data. For us this report is conclusive: arts and culture have more than proven their worth.
My take on performance art is…complicated. My better self has the same respect, the same esteem, for this art and these artists as I do for any art, any artist. My kneejerk self, though, tends to look at performance artists and wonder how much of what I’m seeing is simple self-indulgent exhibitionism? How much is provocative for provocation’s sake? I realize that’s far from open-minded, and not at all fair, but there it is, and that’s why I call it kneejerk. I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Conversely, for reasons that have nothing to do with me and everything to do with the artist, I feel none of those things when I see the work of Marina Abramović. Oh, my kneejerk self is still there, of course (he always is), but the grim and gritty reality of Abramović‘s work has jerked him fiercely and irreparably in another direction. Her work is provocative, naturally enough, arguably even exhibitionist. But instead of reacting to those things, I react to my reaction—which are usually dread and fear. Not of her performance itself, but of its implications, and the truths it forces me to confront. I walk away from Marina Abramović’s performances knowing things I’m not sure I wanted to know.
Marina Abramović was born on November 30, 1946 in Belgrade, Serbia. She was educated at that city’s 
Academy of Fine Arts, with her early work including painting, sculpture, even sound art, before helping to pioneer the performance art movement in the seventies. She’s been working mainly from New York for the past several decades.
A Marina Abramović performance is at best about discomfort, and at worst about physical danger and confrontation. She has been known to sit lock-still for eight or ten hours at a time, with an invitation to all the audience to silently and closely engage with her. She’s subjected herself to paralytics, amnesiotics, even catatonia-inducing drugs during performance, all in a quest to see how the audience and the artist act and react in the rawest of circumstances. She doesn’t blur the line between stage and spectator, she erases it—often with terrifying results.
Most notable, in that respect, was a piece Abramović performed in 1974, called Rhythm 0. Her part consisted of passively standing still for six hours. The active role was assigned to the audience, who were informed via 
signage that they were free to do anything they wanted to her or with her, without limits. To those ends she’d stocked a table with 72 items, some that could inflict pleasure, some pain, and a few, death.
Abramović says that the participation evolved, in a way that’s maddeningly predictable to any of us that fancy ourselves students of human behavior. She says that in the early hours they were playful, or respectful. They were servants of their better angels.
But better angels never last, do they? Within hours, Abramović says, the interplay became more aggressive, 
more harmful, doubtlessly dangerous. She was humiliated, threatened, dehumanized. She probably came closer to death than even she realizes.
By the end of the performance, you can see clearly from the photos, tears were streaming down her face. The same should have been true for any of the 
witnesses, or at least any that hadn’t already abrogated their humanity.
I suspect Marina Abramović prepared herself for the worst when she conceived Rhythm 0. But I wonder if she foresaw the final act. For when the six hours was up, when it was time for her to shed passivity, the audience not only lost their aggressiveness, they completely lost their nerve. They ran away, she says, none of them willing or able to confront a victim that was no longer prepared to be victimized.
And that’s why Marina Abramović scares the hell out of me. Because she travails to confirm a darkness that 
I’m not always willing to acknowledge. She makes me realize that when I’m at my most cynical about that human darkness, I’m probably also at my most accurate.
I can’t say that thrills me, but I recognize it’s probably necessary. For this I know I owe Marina Abramović a debt of gratitude.
Happy birthday, Marina. You scare the hell out of me, but that can only mean you’re doing exactly what you need to do.
Art has to transform something, beyond its own medium and materials. It has to transform a space, even a landscape. Often in doing so, it transforms some minds.
Which is intended, or at least hoped for. But then there are those horrid unintended consequences, the minds you didn’t intend to touch. The sort that see your art and want to burn it to the ground.
The Heidelberg Project in Detroit is probably one of the most important urban art installations ever created, and
undoubtedly one of the most engaging, inviting, and uplifting folk art extravaganzas a world could hope for. It’d be welcome, celebrated, and enjoyed anywhere on earth. That it is sited precisely where it’s most needed only makes it that much more valuable.
But it is under attack. Three suspicious fires, all since last May, have utterly destroyed two of the Heidelberg houses; irreplaceable installations called the Obstruction of Justice (OJ) House, and the House of Soul.
Detroit arson investigators are cautious, as of last Tuesday’s destruction of the House of Soul, pointing out that an average of eight vacant dwellings burn in that city per day. They aren’t quite willing to say that Heidelberg is being deliberately targeted. Two burned buildings, in other words, aren’t yet a pattern.
The third burning at Heidelberg, if it comes, will have to go up like a sacrificial offering—a gut-wrenching loss that just maybe, if the stars line up right, might help forestall further loss. It’s a horror it’ll have to come to that, indeed a horror that any of this has happened at all, but them are the facts, and this is the world we live in. A world where people burn up the art that nourishes the rest of us. Where that has to happen in threes before it’s a pattern, before it can be stopped. If it can be stopped.
Art is transformative, and sometimes it’s transformed into ashes. All the better to see it while you can.
Humulus lupulus: the hop flower. Fruit of a herbaceous perennial vine, cultivated mainly in northern temperate regions, used extensively as an antibacterial herbal additive.
Which is nice. But for my money, hops have one beautiful, noble purpose: they’re what turns a brew of fermented malt into beer.
We’ve talked before about the elegant simplicity of beer—four simple ingredients are all that’s needed. Water and partially germinated grains, when boiled, unlock the malt sugars. Yeast transforms those sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide (suds!). And…I suppose you could stop there. Ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, among others, did just that. And to this day we call their staple brew “beer.”
But believe me, you wouldn’t like it. It’s sickeningly sweet. Also prone to bacterial ruination. And so since the early Middle Ages we’ve added that magical fourth ingredient, the pulchritudinous hop flower, to cut the sweetness and to fight microbial infestation. The result ever since has been the bitter flavor profile of beer we all know and love.
The balance and types of hops and malt constitute the taste continuum of beer varieties—from ales and lagers, stouts and bitters. To dangerously oversimplify the brewing arts, it comes down to this: add more hops, and your beer is more bitter.
But here’s the thing. Too damned many brewers are oversimplifying in just that way.
Here in the States we can trace this phenomenon to the explosion of craft brewers we’ve been blessed with since the late eighties and early nineties. Prior to that the American beer industry consisted of those familiar mega-brewers, all putting out a remarkably uniform, bland product, designed to offend no one’s palate. Our beer was rightly mocked around the world.
But now that we’ve been exposed to less pedestrian styles, we’ve developed tastes and preferences that the corporate brewmeisters in Milwaukee and St. Louis never thought we’d aspire to.
So then, enter the IPA, the India Pale Ale. The pinnacle of hoppiness. IPAs are now one of the most popular craft brew styles in the U.S.
You want bitterness? IPA has it in spades; for a very real, historical reason. IPA gets its name, and it’s hop content, from the British Raj, the colonial rule of the subcontinent from 1858 to 1947. British soldiers stationed in India (hell, British everyone in India) wanted beer from home. But the long hot voyage from Old Blighty to the Jewel In The Crown was not kind to beer. “Skunked” is the usual term for beer that’s gone bad, because that’s exactly how it smells. If you can bring yourself to taste it, it’s likewise reminiscent of something emitted from the ass end of a small furry mammal.
So the brewers turned to hops. Lots of hops. Enough to preserve the ale for months aboard ship. The result was far more bitter than anything brewed before, but drinkers came to love it. We still do.
But dammit, why must we pursue everything to excess? This is the trend I’m seeing now: brewers seem to think that if a lot of hops are good, then an insane amount of hops is best. And what could be easier? Just throw in a few extra scoops while your wort is cooling. And if your competition out-bitters you, then throw in some more. We’re living, dear friends, in the times of the Hop Wars.
Let me be the first to say, then, that this war has no winners. Don’t get me wrong, I like hops. I like IPAs, and I like very bitter beer. But the product some of these brewers are putting out doesn’t seem designed to delight my tastebuds. Seems designed to drive me into the arms of Keystone Light. 
Please don’t misinterpret me. I’m not asking for a cessation of IPA innovation. I encourage—hell, I beg brewers to keep on keeping on with new, delightful takes on the classic IPA. But I ask those same brewers: don’t you agree that just adding more and more hops isn’t innovative? Isn’t it just lazy?
Now I have both good news and bad news in this respect. The good news is that the inspiration for this post was my pre-keyboarding consumption of one of the 
best damned IPAs I’ve ever had the honor of chugging. The bad news is that it’s a so-called “Limited Release,” which I fear means its days are numbered. Oh, Mr. Koch, I’ve never asked you for anything before (I’ve never needed to!). But please, can’t Juniper IPA be a keeper?
Well if not, I’ll toss a salute toward another U.S. brewer that, I think, is doing IPA right. Sierra Nevada creates quite a few extra-hoppy varieties that aren’t 
parodies of themselves. I’m partial to the Torpedo, but I’m happy to recommend them all.
As for the rest, I’m afraid you’re on your own. After all, just because I like it, or I don’t, doesn’t mean you’ll feel the same. Only way you’ll know, naturally enough, is to give ‘em a try.
So as the pithy headline pun puts it, hop aboard. Yeah, I think the Hop Wars are pyrrhic at best. And yes, I think that as a result the market is being flooded with some crappy IPAs. But market self-correction is everyone’s responsibility. So do your duty: go seek the best IPAs out there, and favor them with your patronage. Let them thus, like gorgeous hoppy phoenixes, rise above the rest. Did I call it a pyrrhic war? In this way, we all might just win the Battle of Too Many Hops.
The I Culture You series–starts way back HERE
@SenRandPaul Please don’t plagiarize these words! (aw hell, he probably will)
— Pat Worden (@WordsmithWorden) November 5, 2013
It’s a dilemma, isn’t it? You recognize a problem, you want to help…but the enormity of the thing stops you in your tracks. There are problems confronting us that require massive shifts and unprecedented collective action to solve. When there seems to be scant sign of that happening, you’re tempted to throw up your hands in despair. Individual action seems like such a tiny drop in the bucket, like such an irrelevancy. You’d be forgiven for wondering if individual action really has any impact at all.
But you know…there are a lot of individuals. And a lot of us are taking action. So absolutely, yes: your efforts at recycling, at reducing, reusing, repurposing, and everything else you’re doing to mitigate your carbon footprint is meaningful. Are those efforts making a real dent on the overall atmospheric carbon levels that are endangering our climate and our planet’s future? Maybe not….
But your efforts, plus mine, plus those of everyone else who’re taking this problem seriously, and doing something about it, add up to real, positive change. That can and should give us the hope we need to sustain us, while we get this sooty house in order.
So with that in mind, I’m pleased and honored to participate in Green Gestures, a project sponsored by the online shopping portal, Retale.com. The project couldn’t be simpler, and it’s nicely summed up by the graphic above: One Blog, One Tree. By virtue of
spreading the word (which of course, I’m doing right now), Green Gestures commits to planting a tree on behalf of Worden’s Cultural Deconstruction. That’s it. One blog at a time, one tree at a time; Green Gestures is offsetting the carbon footprint of the blogosphere.
One little tree, soon to be planted. Once it reaches maturity, it can be expected to absorb 29 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, or more than a ton over the course of its lifetime. If every blog out there likewise had a tree planted in its name—well, we just might get a handle on this thing. Here’s hoping we do.
Many thanks and undying respect to Amelia Shroyer, the project manager for Green Gestures, for contacting me and inviting me to participate. And many thanks to you, fellow blogger, for joining in. You are going to join in, aren’t you?
Traditions come and go. Sometimes they even come back. When I was very young, the Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating was abandoned, owing to possibly spurious rumors of poisoned candy or razor blades in apples. Then as I got older, the tradition started to come back—tepidly at first, with strange enablers like the local hospitals, opening up their radiology departments so that worried parents could x-ray suspect treats. Before long trick-or-treating (or 
Beggars’ Night, to some of our older neighbors) was firmly re-ensconced. Kids today, not to mention their older sibs and even their aunts and uncles, probably couldn’t imagine Halloween without it.
But sadly, there’s another kind of Halloween tradition: the kind that’s came and went, never to return, leaving nothing but nostalgia. And with the passing of time, the passing of memories, the passing of generations…even the nostalgia disappears. These traditions become all but forgotten.
Likely as not, there’s a dwindling minority alive today who’ve heard of the Spook Shows that were all the rage in the mid-twentieth century. They were before my time as well; I first heard of them not long ago, in a fascinating DVD commentary appended to a collection of cheesy sixties horror films. The commentary consisted of a voice-over conversation between two Spook Show veterans, who’d staged shows throughout middle America in the fifties, sixties and seventies, now revisiting their days of engineering live thrills and chills for eager, midnight audiences.
The lineage of the Spook Shows is fascinating. We can probably trace it all the way back to the late nineteenth century, to the live seances enacted by the
spirit mediums of the day. We can argue as to whether any spirits were ever actually contacted, but thanks to the efforts of Harry Houdini, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others, the vast majority of mediums were unmasked as theatrical frauds. Unscrupulous though they may have been, most were undeniably talented in their subterfuge. Sleight-of-hand, secret accomplices, and crucially, opportunistic use of pitch-black dark, were all the tools-in-trade of the spirit medium. These tools would also prove crucial to the generations of performers to follow.
Next came the vaudevillians of the twenties—stage magicians who’d learned their craft from the spirit mediums, or perhaps had been spirit mediums themselves. The switch was subtle but telling; they now had an audience who were not looking for true mysticism, but were rather looking to be tricked. Expecting it.
The stage magician never went away, of course, but as the shows evolved, became more grandiose, a few spun off into creating a more easily staged, more pedestrian type of show. It was the Spook Show, or the ghost show—traveling live performances staged at small-town theaters and school auditoriums all across the country.
They came in almost like the circus: silk-screened handbills would appear all over town, promising impossible frights, supernatural appearances, and almost 
always, beautiful girls who would be “sacrificed” to the spooks, right before your unbelieving eyes. This was during the heyday of the Cinemascope movie monsters, so there were sure to be (probably unlicensed) perfomances by Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and Frankenstein’s Monster. The girls would be plants, hired from local modeling agencies, and chosen both for their physical attractiveness and their ability to let loose a bloodcurdling scream.
Much was promised in these shows. I’ve heard old recordings of radio ads, which vowed oceans of blood and nonstop heart-stopping frights. A bit less was delivered. Where the promoter would promise that every girl in attendance would be kidnipped by rampaging monsters, one or two models would be carried off by an actor in a mask. By and large the audiences were okay
with this. Like the vaudeville audiences that preceded them, they were expecting a show. As long as the entertainment was there, then outsized promises would be forgiven.
The entertainment consisted of, in addition to the rubber-faced monsters and the screaming girls, rather cheap tricks. Luminous paint, fishing line, and toy snakes were indispensible. With these they could make the show a personal experience for everyone there. The snakes would be tossed into the audience by unseen hands, often accompanied by recorded screams or a shouted 
desperate cry that “The snakes have gotten loose! They’re in the audience! They’re biting people!” Other plants would hide in the balcony and handle fishing rods, sometimes causing luminous-painted “ghosts” to fly about the theater, sometimes just eerily brushing the faces of audience members with thin filament, while the barker onstage insisted that the spooks were here, and they’re touching you.
So why is the Spook Show gone, and why won’t it come back? That DVD commentary I mentioned blamed it on TV, on the evolution of entertainment, and on a new, more sophisticated audience. Spook Show pioneer Jim “The Mad Doctor” Ridenour said, “An audience would probably burn down the theater if someone tried to scare them with a rubber snake, a luminscent spook, or the good old Frankenstein Monster.”
I’m not so sure. Theatrical haunted houses are insanely popular this time of year (I keep asking my five-year-old daughter if she’s ready for one. She says no). That type of schtick-fright is only a bit removed from the Spook Show methods of yesteryear. Audiences as always simply want entertainment. If they get one good scare, then laugh at themselves because it was a cheesy scare, I think they’d be okay with that.
But no, the Spook Show is gone, forever, for a much simpler reason: the exit light. The Spook Show could only function when it could create, at will, a pitch-dark theater, so that the luminous paint and creeping black-clad stagehands could do their work. Theaters then weren’t required to have the lighted exit signs, or the always-on floor lights, so the gags worked. They wouldn’t today.
And more’s the pity, because that means we’ll never see anything like the Spook Show again. The best we can do (and maybe even this becomes more impossible with the passing of years) —is to remember that once upon a time, the Spooks came alive, right in your hometown theater.
The man who put pop art into pop rock is no more. Lou Reed founded the Velvet Underground in 1964—probably just a bit too early for his revolutionary glam-style of songwriting and performing. He persevered, and by the seventies the world caught up with him. Lou Reed has been mantled ever since with a lead role in the avant garde music movement. Loud Reed and the Velvet Underground were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
Earlier this year Reed underwent a liver transplant at the Cleveland Clinic. His longtime liver disease was said to be related to his years of drug and alcohol abuse, although he had been apparently sober for the last several decades. His candor about his earlier life of self-destructive excess is part of his legend, part of his appeal, and might have been a harbinger of his passing.The AP is reporting today that the cause of his death was a “liver-related ailment.”
It’s not surprising that the toll of rock and roll indulgence might lead to the snuffing out of a light as bright as this one. It’s almost more surprising that the wounded rocking poet would endure so long, 71 years, unto the stature of wise maturity and elder-statesmanship. Lou Reed went places and saw things that are glossingly attractive from the outside, but he returned with warnings of poisoned glamour. We’re all wiser, maybe warier, from listening to Lou Reed’s music.
So thanks for that, Lou Reed. A lot more of us would die on the wild side, if you hadn’t told us just what that walk really costs.
Better late than never, eh?
My latest novella, a strange little thing called The Plug and Play Life was published back in April. For no good reason I didn’t seem to be in a hurry to give it a lil’ marketing TLC. Decided to change that today.
So a warm Deconstructive welcome, please, to a new page dedicated to the topsy-turvy, ever dangerous and constantly changing world of Stephanie Kimball and The Runaway. Click on over and give it a gander, won’t you?
At some point, if we’re smart enough and responsible enough to make the sacrifice, we have to stop being consumers of art and start being conservators.
And it is indeed a sacrifice. The art that demands our protection is not coincidentally the most beautiful, the most culturally important, and always the most vulnerable.
We might have to say goodbye, if only for awhile, if only for far too long, to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes. The Vatican Museums, overseers of publicly displayed art in the Holy See, announced this week that accelerating deterioration of the 16th-century masterpieces might force a drastic curtailing of the number of visitors permitted entry to the Sistine. The vast, interconnected paint-on-plaster adornment of the ceiling and vaultwork, created by Michelangelo Buonarroti between 1508 and 1512 (with further work completed between 1535 and 1541), now suffers from heat, humidity, and carbon dioxide exhaled by the 20,000 visitors the Sistine receives every day. To halt the damage, and to ensure that Michelangelo’s stunning opus endures, the Vatican is considering an indefinite pause to regular Sistine tours.
Which somehow feels like a punch in the gut. I’ve 
never been near the Vatican, never seriously considered going there…but the frescoes have always figured quite prominently on my personal list of most admired artwork.
And now I learn I’ll likely never enjoy them in person, craning my neck in awe the way Michelangelo intended. It’s heartbreaking.
But it’s also the responsible sort of sacrifice I spoke of above. It’s the inter-generational generosity that’s so lacking in almost every other sphere of life. So even as we squander the resources and spoil the planet that others will inherit, we might also follow a higher calling that prompts us to conserve something, anything, and maybe even the best things. The best things that history and art and culture have bequeathed.
In so doing we’re recognizing, perhaps even embracing, our role as caretaker. The frescoes were never ours, were they? There were just placed before us, or more accurately above us, with the expectation that we would pass them on in the same condition in which we received them.
What we have here, then, is both a compelling reality and an impelling metaphor. The reality is that we’re hurting Michelangelo’s frescoes. Destroying them, actually. And that can’t be. So we must do what’s right. We must shut them away.
And the metaphor applies that lesson, that shared and noble sacrifice, to a much larger canvas. Can we save our whole world, can we secure a livable future, for the generations to come? We can, but not easily. If voluntarily closing the Sistine is painful, then the sacrifices necessary to preserve and protect an entire planet and its myriad vibrant populations and cultures might just be too much for us. We’ve seen very little evidence that most of us, perhaps any of us, have the stomach for it.
And yet…
Michelangelo Buonarroti laid on his back, perilously high on creaky wooden scaffolding, and by candlelight he created scenes and images of unbelievable beauty and majesty. We treasure those images because they remind us of what our species is capable of. Against all reason to the contrary, that has to give us hope.
Now it can be told: Ted Cruz is actually a deep-cover Dem-Bot programmed to destroy the GOP from within. Well done, little guy, well done!
— Pat Worden (@WordsmithWorden) October 16, 2013
Sometimes the artist becomes a brand, a profit center. Usually when that happens the results are regrettable.
But sometimes the artist hangs on to his or her integrity. Sometimes the lure of fame and success aren’t enough to dilute the artist’s message or divert the artist’s trajectory. And that, thankfully, is where we find Banksy today.
Banksy is the pseudonym of the masked and unnamed, yet massively famous street artist and cultural phenomenon, who is spray-painting the world with a decidedly subversive, anti-consumerist message. 
Somewhat incongruously, his works are simultaneously selling at superstar prices, even when they’re in the form of public-space murals or illegally hijacked street fixtures. A new breed of street-art collectors are happy to pay Banksy for the opportunity to navigate whatever legal challenges are necessary to transition graffito into prized property.
Here’s what we know about Banksy: He’s in his late thirties, maybe early forties, probably hails from Bristol, England, and probably latched onto his enduring 
habit of obscuring his identity back when he was a lonely hunted street tagger, when the commission of his art could on any night end with his arrest or a thrashing or both.
Here’s what else we know—Banksy is in New York. He’s orchestrating (there’s really no other word for it) an October-long artistic assault on Manhattan, surprising Gotham almost daily with new murals, open-air installations, and performance pieces.
New Yorkers awoke to an example of the latter this Friday past, in the mobile form of a noisy and mightily disturbing proposition that Banksy calls The Sirens of the Lambs. It’s a slaughter-house truck, the dark symbolism of which is not quite tempered by the animated presence of too-cute plush toys. It’s not two-dimensional and it didn’t originate from a Krylon can, but it’s still pure Banksy. Check it out below.
And join me, if you will, in welcoming Banksy to our shores. He’s rich, he’s famous, and he could be standing next to you on the subway and you’d never know it. He’s also rebelliously angry and artistically persuasive. He’s trying to tell you something. Maybe it’s something absolutely vital. You’d better give him a listen, don’t you think?
