Agit pop ... Banksy's phone box
Britain's most celebrated "guerrilla" artist has struck again, reports today's Daily Telegraph. On Wednesday morning, one of London's iconic, soon-to-disappear red telephone boxes appeared in a rundown alley off central London's Soho Square, elaborately customised so that it appeared to have collapsed, crumpled over on its side with an axe plunged into its body and red paint "bleeding" down its windows.
Unfortunately for anybody wishing to inspect the objet in question, Westminster council swung into action pretty swiftly, and after drawing a steady stream of spectators over the morning, by 2pm it had been removed from the public gaze.
Banksy, the understandably secretive individual behind this striking statement, has been steadily building up an international reputation for himself in recent years. His distinctive repertoire of stencilled imagery - gruffly ironic depictions of angels sleeping rough, rats wielding spray cans and weapons, little girls embracing missiles and so on - have become familiar sights around London and established the artist as a lucrative brand on the fringe of the artworld, with at least one gallery selling his images on canvas (to buyers including Christina Aguilera), a cover design commission from Blur, and his own books selling healthily to his growing fanbase.
The phone box has drawn a wide range of responses, although no one thus far - oddly enough for a theoretically controversial voice from the underground - has been calling for Asbos or arrests. The Telegraph read the box as a nostalgic protest against BT's withdrawal of the classic red boxes, while an impressively brazen PR from the telecoms giant declared it "a stunning visual comment on BT's transformation from an old-fashioned telecommunications company into a modern communications services provider". According to Banksy's gallery, a number of local businesses hailed the box's arrival as a welcome attraction in an otherwise rather neglected street.
Even Westminster council seemed in unusually benign mood, saying that "we can't have abandoned works of art on our streets," and suggesting that perhaps Tate Modern might be a better home for the piece, which they are apparently happy to hand back to its creator.
Personally, I took the box to be a comment on the creeping privatisation of the public realm - a somewhat contradictory intention, if so, given that the artist has bypassed "shared" public insitutions to put up something which, whatever else it is, is also an advertisement for artwork his gallery is selling round the corner. But what do you folks reckon?
