I JUST wanted to say a quick word about the latest ‘Banksy’ stunt in London.
I’m doing so not because Banksy is interesting, clever, important or even really an artist in any meaningful way. Like many people in supposedly creative ‘arts’, and like leaders of countries and companies, Banksy is pretty much an inversion of everything he claims to be.
The Culture Wars have been raging in ‘the arts’ longer than anywhere else. It was the art world that became loathsome, ridiculous, antithetical to beauty and sanity, long before Western politics became quite as obviously depraved and self-hating. Modern Art showed elite degeneration before the education system did, and before popular culture did.
For those who aren’t familiar with him, Banksy is the imaginary name of a supposed street artist who has become something of a celebrity. His ‘works’ have had gallery shows and a lot of support from the art world Establishment, and therefore sell for large sums.
This despite or perhaps because of the fact that all are ‘rebel’ graffiti, daubed on walls and streets without permission in acts of ‘artistic’ vandalism. Technically speaking, Banksy’s graffiti-paintings are criminal acts.
Yet the nation which will hurriedly dispatch the police to bang up 12,000 people a year for social media posts that offend someone has never seen fit to pursue the nation’s most famous graffiti vandal.
His latest stunt is a perhaps inevitable expansion of these activities, which if he is the ‘subversive street artist’ he claims is to be must be illegal. In the heart of London a large statue appeared overnight. It’s composed of some kind of resin, and must weigh a fair amount. It stands on a large plinth which also had to be put in place. The whole thing required cranes and a team of people to erect.
Westminster City Council has protected the sculpture with safety barriers and confirmed it will remain in place for public viewing, calling it a ‘striking addition’ to the city’s art scene.
There are two parts to this. Let’s deal first with the content, the message of the piece.
The statue shows a suited, slightly portly man holding a pole with a flag. The flag billows out, covering his face and blinding him as he confidently strides off the plinth.
Leftists and progressives have been rendered ecstatic by this crass, obvious symbolism. The statue of course suggests that people are blinded by loyalty for flags, by group identity and by nationalism. It’s a very crude anti-nationalist point, a smug moral absolute that represents a level of political awareness arrested at the point that a 13-year-old reads Marx.
It’s not a complicated act of symbolism. It’s not a clever one. Indeed, Banksy’s artistic force, such as it is, his immediacy and his ability to delight many people, derives from the soporific shallowness of his observations. What we are being given is a bog-standard slice of contemporary leftism, a truism they all consider unquestionable, presented to them in ‘art’.
It’s the artistic version of a Stewart Lee joke or a Jimmy Kimmel monologue. What it presents is essentially a reflexive sneer that tells anyone left-wing that they are indeed better and cleverer than anyone right-wing. What makes Banksy powerful is that he presents very shallow, very obvious, very reductively false things which his audience already believe very strongly, and they get a jolt of total validating confirmation when they see it.
He presents the shallow smug mind with an image drawn directly from itself, an image that has the exact same smugness and the exact same shallowness. Artistic genius does the very opposite of this – it presents us with something we couldn’t come up with, something utterly unique, something which expresses an original vision or talent or insight.
Genius is never familiar. Even if it says something we agree with, it says it in a way we could not think of ourselves. If its elements are familiar the thing is still suffused with the life, the soul and the individuality of a real artist. The arrangements are unique, the perspective (in every sense) is startling and something we know, instantly, we could not have created.
Banksy is the opposite of this. His ‘genius’ is a huckster’s genius, a cynical and fraudulent awareness that he knows how to reflect back the vast emptiness of the people he delights. He’s very similar in this to other British anti-art luminaries such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. These people are artists as product, machine and regime sponsored frauds of what daring creativity is, who both use the mass production techniques of an Andy Warhol and similarly evade actual creativity or imagination. But even more than Warhol was, they are themselves synthetic, packaged, presented, commodified and cheap. Their thought and their art is utterly denuded of content.
In this they mirror their consumers. It’s a two-way dance of fakery. The mock artist and the mock connoisseurs.
They know virtually nothing. What they do know is all false. Their politics are mass produced and synthetic. Only the most glaringly obvious lies are attractive to them. They are smug, while utterly devoid of cause. They consider themselves unusually smart, when they never think at all. They have a whole grab bag of sloganised attitudes that substitute for thought, most of which repeat three lines of Imagine by John Lennon and never go any further than that.
And Banksy puts that in front of them. Not as comment on their vacuity, but validation of it. Because he utterly shares it.
Palestinian and Jewish kids playing together. Policemen kissing protesters. Guns sprouting flowers. Girls with balloons.
The fantasies of a left that thinks itself rebellious while being the Establishment, of a left that supports terrorists while chanting Peace.
One could say that the statue stunt represents an expansion and perfection of Banksy’s work. It’s more artificial, more smug, and more fake than anything else he’s done.
Rather pitifully, leftists are delighted to ask themselves how the daring Banksy pulled off such a stunt. In a spectacular example of their gullible stupidity, they think Banksy managed some kind of highly co-ordinated ‘stealth art’ placement. In reality, it’s certain that the operation had the support and connivance of local authorities. It’s simply absurd to think that this was an act of subversion. It was a regime gesture via a regime ‘artist’. Useless as our authorities and police are, you cannot spend hours with heavy equipment and cranes putting up a 25ft statue in the most heavily CCTV’d city on Earth without them noticing it.
They approved it. They no doubt commissioned it.
For here is the second main point. The context.
Banksy’s installation mocking loyalty to a flag comes in response to a working-class act of actual rebellion, appealing to real and established symbolism. For several months, people have been raising the flag, placing flags of Saint George and Union Jacks on street furniture, lampposts and the like. This has been a poignant cry of self-awareness from a white working class treated with callous contempt and seeing their nation ruined. It has infuriated every leftist in the nation, including the ruling party.
Banksy’s statue expresses the same contempt for this movement as the Prime Minister has voiced. His statue is erected in a London where anti-English gestures are commonplace. His ‘subversive’ act occurs alongside war memorials and statues from when Britain was proud of itself. Labour councils, the Labour Mayor, and the Labour controlled Met Police have all condemned the raise the flags movement.
None of this is coincidental.
This article appeared in Jupplandia on May 2, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
