I’m getting bored of Banksy’s act – there is nothing to say about his art

There was a time when the appearance of a new artwork by Banksy was thrilling. Not anymore. The latest mural by the anonymous street artist was unveiled on the side of a semi-detached house in Bristol this week. It depicts an elderly lady sneezing, her dentures, handbag and walking stick sent flying in the commotion.

The woman who owns the house hopes its value will skyrocket – and she is probably right. But if we had any sense, the opposite would be true. “Aachoo!”, as the work is called, is banal and lightweight. It alludes to this wretched, virus-ridden year, without telling us anything about it. Like a sneeze, it is both unignorable and instantly forgettable.

Banksy’s work has always been like this. There is so little to say about even his most celebrated, early murals, such as “Girl with Balloon” (2002) or “Well Hung Lover” (2006), beyond the fact that they raise a smile. Which is fine but doesn’t quite warrant international acclaim.

It was the theatre we were seduced by. Who was this person, working under the cover of darkness? And where would they appear next? Cities and towns waited eagerly for Banksy to visit. It was like a magic trick – dawn revealed the surprise and we, poor suckers, would never know how it was done. The art was secondary to the performance.

But this becomes a serious problem when we tire of the performance, for we are then left only with the art. Banksy has been conjuring murals around the world for two decades, his style largely unchanged – neat stencils and a joke. 

The punchline, invariably, is that one object has been replaced by another, confounding expectations. So we have the man throwing, not a missile, but a bunch of flowers. Or the boy catching on his tongue, not snow, but ash from a burning bin. These are political messages that might have been scrawled in the notebook of any quasi-radical student. 

It is striking that Banksy’s best work in recent years was not a mural, created in secret, but a very public performance. In 2018, you might remember, he installed a shredder inside the frame of one of his works, which was being sold at auction. As the hammer came down on a $1.4m (£860,000 at 2018 prices) sale, the painting shredded itself, to audible and genuine gasps. It was a smart puncturing of the absurdity of the art market. Proof, then, that Banksy can still put on a show.

While he is thinking of his next trick, though, I do rather hope he will leave our streets alone.

Yours,

Rupert Hawksley

Commissioning editor, Voices