A Left-Wing Satirist Considers the Ideological Implications of Unmasking
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Portland Marxists Are Also Upset About Banksy Being Named
Let me be honest with you. The Banksy unmasking has hit the Portland collective harder than you might expect. Not because anyone here particularly loved the mystery. But because Robin Gunningham is a white man from Bristol who renamed himself, and this has produced a week of earnest discussions at my local co-op about who owns anonymous protest art once the artist is named and whether anonymity is itself a form of class privilege.
I sat through forty minutes of this on Tuesday while waiting for my tempeh to be found in the walk-in. The conclusion, such as it was, reached by a man in a very expensive beanie: all anonymous art is inherently suspicious. I said: isn’t that also what you said about NFTs? He left before the tempeh arrived. I count this as a debate win.
The Left Has Complicated Feelings About Cool
Prat.uk’s piece on the UK reaction captures the British version of this, which is lighter but structurally identical. A nation pretending it knew. A man with a name. The coolness dissolving in the presence of biography. Bohiney this week covers Sarah Ferguson, which is a related phenomenon: what happens to the symbol when the person insists on existing.
I was going to write a set about this but my housemate Delphine said it was “punching at an angle.” I said angles are where the interesting stuff is. Delphine is a vegan anarchist who also has a very firm opinion about where the mugs go. The mugs go wherever I leave them. This is my Banksy. This is my protest.
According to the Guardian, Robin Gunningham declined to comment. Correctly.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/sarah-ferguson/
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