It's
not a difficult conjecture, how the municipality's police would have
dealt with him had they apprehended him in the act. In fact, the
property clerk division has confiscated one of Banksy's whimsical
productions, the graffiti-style balloons that spelled his name on the
front of a building in Queens, and the deputy chief has pronounced the
latest, if not the final, official opinion on Banksy's endeavors.
According to the New York Times article,
"The letters’ estimated value, according to a gallery
owner who specializes in Banksy’s work, is between $200,000 and
$300,000. But in
the view of the Police Department, which has categorized the balloons as
'arrest
evidence,' they are somewhat less rarefied, possibly to their peril." It
seems that an appreciative pair of amateur art thieves, thinking to
liberate the artifacts from their public venue, were (unlike Banksy)
apprehended in the act and the balloons removed to police safekeeping.
“I don’t have it as art on the invoice,” said Deputy
Chief Jack J. Trabitz, the commanding officer of the property clerk division,
which maintains facilities for evidence storage. “We have it as
a balloon.”
Deft,
perspicacious, unceremonious, entirely to the point. It's the
literalism of the official mind, I think, that is the proper, the
sharpest and the most efficient instrument with which to deflate
Banksy's balloons and to relegate him, tersely and without any agonized ambiguity, to his proper niche in the artistic pantheon, which
would be somewhere in the back, by the latrines.
Whether
Banksy's balloon is just a balloon in the way that Marcel Duchamp's
"Fountain" is just a signed urinal ("R. Mutt"), I am not qualified to
answer, though I suspect it's clear which side of the question Deputy
Chief Trabitz would come down on. If you're sympathetic to Banksy's
whimsies, then you may find the parallel with Duchamp an obvious one. It
may be dabatable whether either is (was) an artistic genius. In the
official mind, naturally, there is never any debate. To take Banksy's quirky, graffiti-like balloon installation "as a balloon" is to take "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" as a travel documentary.
