Consider what graffiti means to the course of western art. It's not just raising the cry against the defacing of NYC by developers from the city admin top down -- the demolition of 5Pointz, the graffiti center -- that's just the content message.
Transgressive is the distinctive hallmark of western culture's art -- the abiding dissatisfaction with normal, of workaday and wifery and whitesupremacy. Traditional arts of traditional cultures celebrate their normal with gods and godesses and Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Not here n the West since industrialization raped society and gave us Romanticism and angry, moralistic art from Dickens to Beethoven, desperately seeking authenticity in feeling and rebellion.
Transgression in NYC-wide art is so much more satisfying than Christo's pretty orange banners of decorum that the mayor endorsed in his stately backyard of Manhattan's Central Park, the world's most upscale leisure ground. At last, Banksy -- the perfect hipster art: it can't be untransgressive or acceptable even if the mayor allows it or Kelly ignores it. It can be acceptable and normal only to hipsterism. Even if it becomes the popular sensation of the doucheoisie, it's still illicit graffiti art -- transgressive art of the mischievous kid, pre-adult pre-normal culture, marginal to the emotional-death-in-normality and alienation.
There is no affect in normal. Only a western mind could write "The key to joy is disobedience." Banksy is the latest NY cronut and defacing his art scrawls all over Bloomberg's signature on this city and repos his Midas touch that silenced all urban pulse. Silence is Death; Speakout=Deface.
Banksy is clever and cool. Defacing his art repossesses graffiti and the city from Bloomberg's self-congratulations.
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