Under & Uber

I cannot help but pass on these marvelous little snippets of Dalrymple's erudition because they so accurately describe my own feelings towards the subjects he so eloquently eviscerates. this one concerns the graffitti artist (a true oxymoron) Banksy:

Of course, Banksy, as a spoiled child of a consumer society in which real shortage is unthinkable, has all the unexamined anticapitalist prejudices of the lumpenintelligentsia to whom he appeals.

.....Banksy’s attitude toward authority and property rights is the standard hostility of the lumpenintelligentsia. Here he is particularly hypocritical because, while maintaining that pose of hostility, he employs lawyers, owns private companies, and is reputed to be highly authoritarian in his dealings with his associates. Inside every rebel, goes the saying, there’s a dictator trying to get out.
 

.....Nor is there any awareness on Banksy’s part that the very hostility to authority and indifference to property rights that he lauds, which is now so widespread in Britain, might have played some part in the brutalization of British life.
 

..... Banksy’s little jokes can be damaging in their effect, as Wall and Piece attests only too clearly. Banksy painted the words DESIGNATED GRAFFITI AREA in an official-looking way on three whitewashed walls in elegant areas of London, and they were shortly covered with the horrible and idiotic graffiti that usually targets only concrete walls and tunnels. Banksy argues that all public space should be available for self-expression by the people, forgetting that the majority of the people may want to express themselves by leaving elegant blank walls elegantly blank. But then, they are only people, not the people, a crucial distinction in Banksy’s mind.
 

....Despite his wit, Banksy’s sensibility is both conventional and adolescent. Evidence of his conformism is that all his targets are easy and of the sort chosen by the lumpenintelligentsia (which does not, again, mean that they are necessarily unworthy). For Banksy, it is always “four legs good, two legs bad”: a simplistic worldview in which the common people, as defined by their authenticity, opposition to authority, lack of respect for property rights, and indifference to high culture, can do no wrong, while the rest, inauthentic, law-abiding or themselves in authority, careful of their own property and respectful of others’, and cultured in the traditional sense, can do no right and are either fools or oppressors.

This worldview is that of the eternal adolescent, ever eager to shock the grown-ups with his supposedly contrary views, cleverly and uncompromisingly expressed. Truth comes a distant second to effect. When Banksy said, one Christmas, “At this time of year it’s easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity—the lies, the corruption, the abuse,” he was not so much enunciating a truth as establishing his credentials as a fearless iconoclast; though it would obviously be far more iconoclastic in certain circles (those in which he moves, for example) to have said something more truthful and less adolescent.
 

....Leys says that the true philistine is not he who does not care to discriminate between the good and the bad, but he who discriminates and chooses the bad. Banksy is such a philistine, and his talent is not an extenuating but an aggravating circumstance.