Banksy is the last thing we need right now

Tedious street artist Banksy has been busy in London this past week. On Monday, a stencilled goat appeared near Kew Bridge. It was soon followed by two silhouetted elephant heads in the bricked-up windows of a house in Chelsea, three monkeys swinging across a bridge over Brick Lane, a howling wolf adorning a satellite dish in Peckham, two pelicans swooping for cod above a Walthamstow fish and chip shop, and a cat stretching on a damaged billboard in Cricklewood. Today, Banksy unveiled his latest creation in central London – a glass police box made to look like a tank of piranhas.

Apparently, there is a point to all this. A spokesperson for the famously pseudonymous graffiti artist told the Observer that the works are ‘designed to cheer up the public ­during a period when the news headlines have been bleak, and light has often been harder to spot than shade’. Apparently, Banksy hopes that the ‘uplifting works cheer ­people with a moment of unexpected amusement, as well as to ­gently underline the human capacity for ­creative play, rather than for destruction and negativity’.

So there you have it. He is performing a great, noble service to the nation, hoping his animal stencils will, I quote, lead us away from ‘destruction and negativity’.

Talk about delusions of grandeur. This is not Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, is it? This is an ageing trustafarian spray-painting a few vaguely amusing animal murals on satellite dishes and townhouses.

Banksy’s self-aggrandisement aside, it’s also amusing to see him portrayed as pushing back against ‘negativity’. This is Banksy we’re talking about here – an artist who has peddled virtually every miserable, chattering-class prejudice going.

His 2015 project, ‘Dismaland’, offered up a ‘satirical’ attack on Disneyland – and the supposedly moronic masses who visit it. His 2017 anti-Brexit mural showed a workman mournfully chipping off one of the EU flag’s yellow stars, no doubt bringing a tear to the eye of Andrew Adonis.

At each stage of his decades-long career, Banksy has given expression to every misanthropic, anti-masses sentiment going, from climate alarmism to anti-consumerism. In his 2004 book, Cut It Out, he said he was obsessed with rat imagery because it’s a metaphor for the ‘the human race’ – some of whom just ‘eat junk food’ all day and ‘shout abuse’.

At least some people have treated Banksy’s latest sixth-former offerings with the respect they deserve. The drawing of a cat on a damaged billboard was removed within hours of its appearance by a contractor. ‘We’ll store that bit [the art] in our yard to see if anyone collects it’, he told reporters, ‘but if not it’ll go in a skip’.

If only Britain’s art critics had a fraction of this common sense.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.