The towering art critic Robert Hughes once remarked that, if we thought ’80s art was bad, ’90s art was going to be even worse. Things haven’t improved in the decades since. Hughes never, to my knowledge, ventured an opinion on graffiti “artist” Banksy before his death, but I can’t imagine that his verdict would have been at all complimentary.
After all, Hughes was, as one obituary noted, the “scourge of phony art and absurd demagoguery”. Banksy continually plumbs new depths of both. His “statements” give dreary new meanings to the word “trite”, whilst his “art” makes Warhol (a “shallow painter who understood more about the mechanisms of celebrity than any of his colleagues”) look like Picasso. As Hughes said of another graffiti “artist”, Jean-Michel Baquiat, “in a saner culture than this one, [he] might have gone off to four years of boot camp in art school, learned some real drawing abilities… and in general, acquired some of the disciplines and skills without which good art cannot be made”.
Ours is not, alas, a sane culture. And so, like Basquiat, Banksy became a star.
Still, it can be argued that Banksy inadvertently shines a light on the insanities of our contemporary culture.
A new Banksy mural drew crowds to a London street on Monday, even before the elusive graffiti artist confirmed that the work was his.
The artwork in the Finsbury Park neighbourhood covers the wall of a four-story building and shows a small figure holding a pressure hose beside a large cherry tree. Green paint has been sprayed across the wall, replicating the absent leaves of the tree, which has been severely cropped.
Quite without meaning to, this work highlights the cretinous absurdities of both modern art and environmental activism.
As a work of art, it is almost entirely without merit. Not even the stencil is particularly well made. The rest makes Jackson Pollock look as meticulous a draftsman as Michelangelo. Its “environmental message” is even more hilariously inept.
The new attraction drew a stream of onlookers who took photos and snapped selfies. Many discerned an environmental message in the vibrant green artwork, which appeared on Sunday – St Patrick’s Day.
“The tree looks very sad without branches and without greenery,” said Pura Lawler, on her way to a gym class. She felt Banksy was saying something about “destroying the forests, destroying the greenery.”
Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who represents the area in Parliament, said the work “makes people stop and think, ‘Hang on. We live in one world. We live in one environment. It is vulnerable and on the cusp of serious damage being done to it.’”
“Environmental politics is about densely populated urban areas like this, just as much as it is about farmland and woodland and hedges,” he added.
Stuff
In fact, it’s all about densely populated urban areas – because those are where almost all “environmentalists” live out almost their entire lives. The Greens’ vote is exclusively restricted to the inmost areas of the megalopolises. Environmentalists confine themselves to the most urbanised areas of the planet. The natural environment is something they mostly see on TV: as alien to their experience as the surface of Mars.
And it shows.
Jeremy Corbyn may not know much about art, but it’s clearly more than he knows about nature.
Pollarding trees, as has been done to the tree in question, is a method of heavy pruning which promotes dense new growth. Not far from where I grew up were lengthy avenues of plane trees that were pollarded every winter, at which time they indeed looked barren and denuded. Come spring and summer, though, they’d burst into lush new foliage. In autumn, they were a glory of oranges, reds and browns.
Pollarding also encourages undergrowth, increasing the biodiversity of forests. When pollarding is stopped, as Banksy and his idiot admirers clearly wish, the effect is reversed, as the trees slowly choke out the light reaching the forest floor.
Once again, city-based “environmentalists” are attacking a form of wise environmental stewardship of which they are as completely ignorant as they are of good art.
