Banking on Banksy
Calling the enigmatic Banksy a “graffiti artist” is like calling George Bush a politician – there’s so much more to it than that – but it is on the street where he’s destined to make his biggest dent, Basquiat with a razor conscience.
I came across the Briton’s considerable fame while poking around in the art brewery at Juxtapoz Magazine, where he appears to enjoy god-like status, and was prepared to be dismissive until I popped into his own website, a brutally austere place that’s nevertheless packed with cool things, and read his “manifesto”.
This is in fact an excerpt from the account of a British soldier who was among the first to see the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II. The surviving prisoners were in in need of everything, yet some idiot had shipped them a crate of lipstick. Never mind, the writer discovered with awe as he watched spindly women die with their paint on, it was exactly what they needed to become human again. See the rest.
