Megan Amram on Banksy, the Portland left’s identity crisis, and a Tuesday existential moment
Written for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Banksy Is a 51-Year-Old Man From Bristol and I Am in Crisis
I want to be clear that I have loved Banksy my entire politically conscious life. I have put his work on my laptop. I wrote about him in three separate undergraduate essays. I quoted him at a rally in 2022 in a way that I now find slightly embarrassing but stand by spiritually. And now he is Robin Gunningham from Bristol, 51, who changed his name to David Jones, and the Portland left does not know what to do with this information.
The Ideology of Anonymity
We believed in the anonymity because we needed to believe that the art could belong to anyone. That it was not one man’s brand. That when a rat held a sign, the rat was all of us. Now the rat is specifically Robin’s rat and Robin has a Wikipedia page and Robin went to a private school, which the internet has, naturally, discovered and is processing loudly. The Guardian, to its credit, is handling this with some nuance. My group chat is not.
My friend Dev says it doesn’t matter. “The work is still the work.” My friend Clara says the private school changes everything. I am somewhere in the middle, eating a vegan breakfast burrito on SE Hawthorne and feeling the weight of ideological complexity at seven-thirty in the morning, which is too early for this. I wrote about this on my site last week. My mother, in North London, texted to say she had always thought Banksy was “a bit much.” She was right. She is often right. This is very annoying.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/sarah-ferguson/
Further left-wing feelings at The Daily Mash.
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