Weekend link-o-rama

Don’t Fret in San Francisco

It’s back to school in a few days for the college-aged Vandalog bloggers. Caroline moving to New York City tomorrow, so say hello if you see her around.

Photo courtesy of Don’t Fret

Banksy news update

Photo by S.Butterfly

We’ve got a few bits of Banksy-related news to share, so it’s all being lumped together here:

  • It looks like there will be a new Banksy print this Christmas March 2012 from Pictures on Walls (no surprise). The print will be based on this gorilla image, which was recently buffed accidentally. Even Pictures on Walls’ description of the print in a bit tongue-in-cheek about the recycling of this older image into a print with different glittery color options.
  • A number of people have emailed me after seeing this Banksy installation (photo by Just) at Pictures on Walls’ winter group show (which Just has plenty more photos of) because it looks a bit like this sculpture by Giles Walker and Peter Dunne from a couple of years ago. Personally, I prefer Dunne and Walker’s piece, but I don’t think the pieces are too similar for comfort. Could Banksy have seem the work by Dunne and Walker and been inspired partially by that? Definitely. But it’s not just an outright copy, and I’m often hesitant to say that any Banksy idea has been outright stolen from another artist, since most of his ideas rely on pretty simple themes and symbols, so it’s likely that others have tried similar things before whether Banksy knew about it or not.
  • It now seems unlikely that we will ever get confirmation from Banksy’s website that the piece pictured at the top of this post and covered on Vandalog last month is a Banksy. Foreignstudents.com happened to catch some photos of the work being put up. No faces of the artist or his crew, but the site did get images of a scaffolding being put up that covered the work while it was being done, and they say a man posing as a security guard stayed at the scaffolding for some of the time that it was up. So if this wasn’t Banksy’s work, someone may still come forward claiming responsibility. I’m confident however that this was the work of Banksy, so given these photos and any more that might be out there, taking responsibility seems risky for his anonymity.

Photo by S.Butterfly