Rumors have been circulating around the internet for a few days, but later this week Banksy is now set to open a new pop-up exhibition entitled "Dismaland" at in Weston-Super-Mare, UK.
The venue is called "Tropicana", a 10,200-square-foot site to be transformed into "Dismaland", a probable attack on American entertainment giant Disney. [...]
As usual with Banksy, the details are very scarce, but earlier this morning Iain Brimecome and Jon Goff were able to fly their drone above the site [...].
— streetartnews.net
Another aerial view of "Dismaland," expected to open later this week. Photo: Iain Brimecome & Jon Goff, image via streetartnews.net.
Photo via @francisclarke on Twitter.
Banksy in the Archinect news:
14 Comments
Brilliant. Like everything else he's done.
I'm already sick of drones.
Some first images from inside the show (via Banksy Street Art Tumblr)
that shit is a disaster.
banksy sucks. so literal/political - easy "art" for the masses. Every-time I see a new one of these hokey-ass banksy projects they make me cringe, no sophistication. I just think of some pimple faced 13 year old just getting into punk rock....we get it, corporations suck...but not as bad as your shitty "art" - using that term loosely
There is far more here than commentary on corporations. Banksy's work is as much about the nature of art itself as Pop Art was. But you don't have to get it or like it.
Guerrilla art, hang and run, graffiti, ingenious. More performance than artifact. His film is wonderful.
I get it...I just don't like it...bad one-liners.
If you think the work has basis in institutional critique, you gotta ask who are the benefactors that pay for this garbage...
That's just about the longest one liner ever. A whole lot of effort to make a statement.
A crucification of pop culture, many will be offended. In other words it's brilliant. Features the work of 50 artists from 17 countries.
I have loved Banksy's graffiti, and I completely loved Exit Through the Gift Shop, it was one of the best criticisms of the art world I've seen. But this Dismaland project didn't look interesting to me and this review by Jonathan Jones for The Guardian seems to confirm why I felt this wouldn't be a very good piece of art.
In reality the crazy fairgrounds and dance tents at rock festivals are far more subversive – because they are joyous. - Jonathan Jones
As John Green says, being unafraid to show enthusiasm is far more dangerous than is being critical.
It's called Dismaland, it's not supposed to be joyous.
I'm not convinced it's a thoughtful critique so much as a Disneyland for dismal people.
Schopenhauer and me don't approve at all!
chigurh, your comment is spot on, by the way.
People critique Disney et al far more cuttingly via photoshop. Does making this thing a large physical presence make it any more thoughtful than it would be as a Facebook meme?
This is not subversive, in any way. Here is something totally subversive: Hypermiling. Especially when it's *not* done in any kind of public competition.
I thought they were recent photos of the Beijing Summer Olympics venues. Nothing like the Olympic Committee and host country big wigs screwing the taxpayers out of millions and millions and leaving a wasteland behind for the taxpayers to clean up. I think in recent memory only the Barcelona Olympics had any lasting positive effect on the host city. Whistler/Blackcomb went tits-up while the Winter Olympics were going on!
While folk tales were often morally ambiguous or downright ambivalent, stylised fairy tales were frequently intended to mould social behaviour according to the mores of the rich. Perrault himself was clear about his pedagogical intentions. Such stories were useful since they could be made to contain hidden instructions for children.
It’s no surprise, then, that Disney’s tales have played such a key role in its hyper-capitalist dominion.
But even despite landfills of princess merchandise, Disney too has dabbled in the vaguely horrifying. The death of Bambi’s mother scarred generations of children, as did the Technicolor perversities of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island. Dumbo’s Pink Elephants are in a class of their own. Watching the children play at Dismaland I was reminded of all these things; and reminded too that there is a value, surely, in allowing children to come face-to-face with their own fears and realities; their unexpressed anxieties, dreams and nightmares; danger and loss.
There is no moral to this particular story. Except to say that, perhaps, Dismaland’s re-imagining of the Disney fairy tale is truer to its folk roots than was intended. While a fairy tale is pinned down and fixed, like a glue-tusked pony in formaldehyde, the folk tale is a living organism that changes with every telling; becoming something different depending on the who, the where and the how. Four weeks from now, perhaps Dismaland itself will be a pickled pony. But on Saturday, it was magic.
Full review here.
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