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There are essentially three things that every New Yorker talks about: how terrible the city is, how miserable it makes us feel, and the small pile of chicken bones each of us wakes up to everyday, outside our apartments. But in the summer of 2013, some New Yorkers felt a little bit better when they discovered that Banksy would be coming the bustling hellhole they call home. The Oscar-nominated graffiti artist challenged himself to make a new piece of public art every day that summer, most of it his great success. Banksy in New York, directed by Chris Moukarbel, documents that famous summer, and is set to premiere on HBO this upcoming November.
Bansky previously appeared in Exit Through The Gift Shop, an Academy Award-nominated documentary labeled “the world’s first street art disaster movie” (whatever that means). But the HBO doc will focus on Bansky’s New York summer, including the time he sold his art – priced at approximately a half-million dollars a piece – for approximately $60 a pop. Without art world “promotion,’ Bansky made less than $500 that day. There was also the time he transformed the inside of a delivery truck to resemble a – fully materialized – landscape painting, oooh and the time he filled a meatpacking truck – set to take real animals to the slaughterhouse – with squeaking stuffed ones. For more fawning, take a look the pretty great though unrelated trailer made by/approved by Banksy below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y54X4tLUAs
Reactions to Banksy’s work were mixed (God, Michael Bloomberg comes across like such a loser in that trailer), but they were at least noted by more than two people. Some people stole it, and others even took control of the scene and charged people admission prices. Obviously, the art world lost their sh*t on that one, claiming that the two guys from East Brooklyn took advantage of the situation – as compared to poor Marxist souls charging $16 a pop for MOMA gazpacho. There was a lot of wonderful work that came out that summer, check it out on Instagram, Youtube, Google search.