Posts Tagged ‘graffiti’
“We have no ideas, and they’re pretty firm”*…
Our old friend Banksy is in the news again. The BBC reports:
A new Banksy mural showing a group of pigeons holding anti-immigration banners has been destroyed following a complaint the work was “racist”.
The mural in Clacton-on-Sea – where a by-election is due to take place following the local MP’s defection to UKIP [the UK Independence Party, an ostensibly anti-EU, actively anti-immigrant party] – appeared this week. It showed four pigeons holding signs including “Go Back to Africa”, while a more exotic-looking bird looked on.
The local council, which removed it, said it did not know it was by Banksy. Tendring District Council said it received a complaint that the mural was “offensive” and “racist”.
The artist, who chooses to remain anonymous, posted pictures of the work on his website earlier. But by the time it had been announced, the mural had already been removed due to the complaint received on Tuesday…
… which is an ironic shame, given that the piece was, of course, anti-racist, and that it was an authentic Banksy, whose street work has sold for as much as $1.8 million, a boost the economically-challenged town could surely have used.
* Joesph Heller, Good as Gold
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As we take aim at our own feet, we might spare a thought for Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone– better known by his canonized handle, St. Francis of Assisi; he died on this date in 1226. Founder of the men’s Order of Friars Minor (core of the Franciscan Order), the women’s Order of St. Clare, and the Third Order of Saint Francis for men and women not able to live the lives of itinerant preachers, he believed that nature itself was the mirror of God, and strove to bring the Gospel to all God’s creatures.
Giotto’s “Legend of St. Francis, Sermon to the Birds,” in the upper Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi
Taking it to the streets…
From traditional road signs…
… to the more modern electric variety…
… to the road itself…
… local artists and hackers around the world are adding spice to the daily drive. See more at Web Urbanist’s “Culture Jamming: New Subversive Signs of Our Times.”
As we search for spray paint in an environmentally-friendly non-aerosol can, we might recall that it was on this date in 1902 that Henry Leland formed the Cadillac Automobile Company. When Henry Ford left the Henry Ford Company with several of his top lieutenants earlier that year to start the Ford Motor Company, the stranded financiers asked Leland, a master engineer, to appraise the plant and equipment for sale. In the event, Leland bought the assets and re-started the operation, naming the new venture after his ancestor, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, the founder of the city of Detroit. The company’s logo– the crest– is based on a coat of arms that Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac had created at the time of his marriage in 1687.
But while Leland is best remembered for Cadillac, he has arguably touched more lives via his invention of electric barber clippers.
Shifty…
Readers know that street art comes in a variety of guises, from the direct-albeit-ironic (c.f. Banksy, here and here) to the ethereal (c.f., the work of Chinese artist Liu Bolin here). Now, on Berlin’s Bergmannstraße, one can find a tagger’s homage to tacky postcards and cheap religious artifacts past: Lenticular Graffiti…
See larger (and more) photos at Spreeblick. (TotH to Wooster Collective)
As we look both ways before crossing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1184 BCE, according to the calculations of Eratosthenes, that Troy was sacked and burned.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Third Century Greek mathematician, elegiac poet, athlete, geographer, astronomer, and music theorist. He was the first person to use the word “geography” and invented the discipline of geography as we understand it, and invented a system of latitude and longitude, calculated (with remarkable accuracy) the circumference and tilt of the earth, and created a map of the world; he reputedly also accurately calculated the distance from the earth to the sun and invented the leap day. And to the point of the anniversary celebrated today, Eratosthenes was the founder of scientific chronology; he worked especially hard to fix the dates of the chief literary and political events of the conquest of Troy.
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