For his final piece of street art in NYC, Banksy attached a huge balloon that said “Banksy!” to the side of an abandoned building on OCtober 31, 2013.
Three men tried to remove the balloon from the building that same day and were arrested. Police have confiscated the balloon piece, which an art dealer told the New York Times is worth between $200,000 and $300,000.
Police deflated the balloon which is currently being stored on the third floor of the Police Department’s building on Pearson Place in Long Island City, a police spokeswoman told the New York Times.
“I don’t have it as art on the invoice,” Deputy Chief Jack J. Trabitz told the New York Times. “We have it as a balloon.”
In a beautiful tribute to Lou Reed, Patti Smith wrote in the current issue of New Yorker:
I met Lou at Max’s Kansas City in 1970. The Velvet Underground played two sets a night for several weeks that summer. The critic and scholar Donald Lyons was shocked that I had never seen them, and he escorted me upstairs for the second set of their first night. I loved to dance, and you could dance for hours to the music of the Velvet Underground. A dissonant surf doo-wop drone allowing you to move very fast or very slow. It was my late and revelatory introduction to “Sister Ray.”
Within a few years, in that same room upstairs at Max’s, Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, and I presented our own land of a thousand dances. Lou would often stop by to see what we were up to. A complicated man, he encouraged our efforts, then turned and provoked me like a Machiavellian schoolboy. I would try to steer clear of him, but, catlike, he would suddenly reappear, and disarm me with some Delmore Schwartz line about love or courage. I didn’t understand his erratic behavior or the intensity of his moods, which shifted, like his speech patterns, from speedy to laconic. But I understood his devotion to poetry and the transporting quality of his performances. He had black eyes, black T-shirt, pale skin. He was curious, sometimes suspicious, a voracious reader, and a sonic explorer. An obscure guitar pedal was for him another kind of poem. He was our connection to the infamous air of the Factory. He had made Edie Sedgwick dance. Andy Warhol whispered in his ear. Lou brought the sensibilities of art and literature into his music. He was our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.
Art Spiegelman self-portrait for the New York Times, via the New York Times.
The front page of today’s New York Times Arts & Leisure section includes a wonderful overview of the artist Art Spiegelman, who is best know for his graphic novel, “Maus.”
“It’s a landmark, the greatest graphic novel ever drawn,” Chris Ware tells the Times. “What makes it so special is not just the comics, not just the Holocaust, but that it’s an incredibly good, human book.”
A retrospective of Spiegelman’s work opens at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan on Nov. 8, 2013.
Head over to the New York Times to read about Spiegelman.
This past week the Village Voice published a wonderful essay on Lou Reed. Peter Gerstenzang zeroed in on the import of Lou Reed’s songwriting, calling him “Bob’s equal,” the Bob being, of course, Mr. Dylan.
Gerstenzang wrote:
Even knowing there was a cat around named Bob Dylan, who often gets the credit for marrying poetry and mature ideas to Rock and Roll, Lou Reed, who died from the results of liver disease, is, I believe, every bit Bob’s equal. Unquestionably as important, possibly more influential. Although there’s some similarity in their backgrounds (they’re both real rockers who listened to Little Richard before they ever read Rimbaud), Lou did things differently than Dylan. Where Bob introduced surrealism and symbolism into our music, Lou Reed did the same for realism. Perhaps, more accurately, photorealism.
Sure, Dylan told us about the mystery tramp, Queen Jane, that ghostly Johanna, people who lived in our dreams. Reed, no matter where he grew up or who he studied with, told us about people who lived in New Yawk. In 1964 or so, with Dylan delighting in “majestic bells of bolts” and tambourine men, Lou was writing, in complex, but no uncertain terms, about the kind of people who couldn’t resist the siren’s song, the supremely majestic feeling of shooting smack. Or speed. No code words, no metaphors, no clever substitutions. And, without any obvious moralizing, how when these drugs turned on you, you just wished you were dead.
For the rest of this insightful essay, head over to the Village Voice.
As you probably know by now, the painting he “vandalized,” “The banality of the banality of evil,” sold at auction yesterday for $615,000 to someone using the tab “gorpetri,” for bidding.
Banksy’s “The banality of the banality of evil,” a thrift store painting that Banksy added a Nazi soldier to, has been auctioned at the online charity website, BiddingForGood for $615,000 by a bidder going by the online tag, gorpetri.
Bidding began Tuesday of this week with a minimum bid of $74,000. There were a total of 138 bids. The auction ended today (Oct. 31, 2013) at 8 pm EDT.
The painting is signed by the original artist, and by Banksy. It’s 36” x 24.5” and the frame is 43” x 31.5.”
The money raised will go to Housing Works. Below is the BiddingForGood website description of Housing Works:
Housing Works is a healing community of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Our mission is to end the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through relentless advocacy, the provision of lifesaving services, and entrepreneurial businesses that sustain our efforts.
The bidding continues for the thrift store painting that Banksy “vandalized.” As of 4:55 PST, five minutes before the end of the auction, the bidding had reached $350,600.
Banksy added the Nazi to this landscape, along with his autograph in the lower left corner.
