Banksy is the patron saint of the “I’m 13 and this is deep” mentality.

"Blinded by nationalism" I don't know, seems like a clear concise message that has relevance in today's world.

Are you from the UK and know what the piece is a reference to? It’s topical and unpretentious and comes at a time where the country is splintering. Feels a like a bit of a distant midwit take to take shots at the appeal it has.

Most galvanizing statements have been pithy and comprehensible to 13 year olds. The general population is not doing a deep dive in to something like Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” contemplating the proper role of government, and then getting fired up to act. We need CliffsNotes, slogans, and visible art like this.

The irony is that the statue is being guarded by the London police.

Heaven forbid someone tries to communicate a point with art.

I think it deserves credit for being both simple and original.

So, you are 14 and you understand the world? Doesn't seem like it

It doesn't need to be super layered to be impactful?

Plus the execution is also part of the art.

Actually it’s a great example of something different, where the person who was original and eventually becomes ubiquitous and groundbreaking and widely imitated to the point where it's hard to understand just how original they actually are.

There are many examples of the same thing: Andy Warhol and the soup cans and screen-printed portraits with different color backgrounds or Led Zeppelin and English folk hard rock songs that have hobbits in them are two of them.

Eventually, it's hard to even process their work in the context of how predictable and trite it seems to be a few decades later.

Account created last year, is Banksy your patron saint?

Really riles up PE types and "patriots" though.

This works really well these days, when the average person is 13.

He's also king of the "I'll criticize the west but I'll turn a blind-eye to non-democratic countries' wrongdoings". A trait shared with virtually all intellectuals and artists in the west.

There are fights worth fighting: for example there are 300 million women alive who have undergone forced genital mutilation. 300 million ain't cheap change. There are also hundreds of millions of people who applauded the killing of 1200 young civilians who were enjoying life at a music festival "because it's resistance".

Applauding the killing of young unarmed civilians, genitally mutilating women and turning a blind-eye to a regime slaughtering 30 000+ of its own unarmed civilians is where I personally draw the line and consider there are maybe more important things to complain about than, say, "the patriarchal western society built by heterosexual white men" or some other woke non-sense like that.

Now to be honest Banksy did art criticizing war overall, not just war started by the west. So a generous reading could consider that he also criticizes things like the 800 000 deaths during the Hutu vs Tutsi war.

But still overall: lots of balls from western artists when it's about criticizing the west, but tiny tiny nuts when it's about, say, attacking the ideology that is responsible for 300 people enjoying music at the Bataclan and then getting slaughtered.

But these people can live with their own conscience: I speak up and I've got mine.

[dead]

This criticism would carry more weight if the people this statue criticises had the intellectual and emotional maturity beyond that of a teenager.

Unfortunately, they often don't meet that bar, so the message has to be in a form they can understand.

> Banksy is the patron saint of the “I’m 13 and this is deep” mentality.

You are wrong.

Maybe, but in 100 years, people looking back on the current era will easily understand the work. It symbolically communicates something about the spirit of the age.