Banksy's gymkhana in New York
"Where is it?" "In Chinatown where?" "Can you still see?" Those may be one of the most repeated questions in New York these days, since on October 1 Banksy started his particular gymkhana or treasure hunt in banksyny.com , the website where, for the rest of the month, a new work will be uploaded daily that passers-by should find. The artist has baptized this urban experiment Better Out Than In ("better outside than inside").
The photos themselves are the first clue for us treasure hunters. The second clue? The audio guide that can be heard online or dialing the telephone number that usually accompanies each piece. Supposedly, a call to that number provides more clues as to where the work in question is located. But they are not easy to crack (I certainly can't). So the easiest thing is always… go to Google, of course. Being aware of social networks and the internet has become the best strategy to reach the "Banksys": Almost as soon as the artist posts a photo, someone finds out exactly where it is.
Now comes the next step, the most complicated. Arrive in time to see the graffiti, sculpture or performance before anyone has erased it, crossed it out or, directly, stolen it . The first one he discovered (a child on top of another trying to catch the spray on a sign that read “Graffiti is a crime”) suffered all kinds of attacks: first someone signed over it, then they changed the sign, later the they painted it white and finally took it away. All in less than 24 hours. Now, in fact, the one who took the poster has created his own street show and uploads photos of him all over New York to Instagram, like an Amélie gnome. Other pieces were not so lucky and, in less than two hours, they were already deleted (like Occupy The Musical).
"I used to think other graffiti artists hated me because I use stencils, but they just hate me," Banksy himself told the popular free newspaper The Village Voice in an exclusive and top-secret interview.
Signofbanksy: a street show
Armed with the list of addresses of his pieces from the last nine days, I have launched myself into the streets of New York, trying to find everything that Banksy has been doing and, with luck, what he will do that same day.
First stop: Allen Street between Canal and Hester. From the piece that inaugurated Better Out Than In, only a white spot remains, the shadow of the two children and the template of a signature.
Before and after
Second stop: 7 Delancey Street (between Bowery and Christie), one of three locations where he added 'The Musical' to graffiti already there. This is the only one that is still visible, although someone has already signed above . The other two (in Bushwick and Williamsburg) have already been completely removed as seen in photos from neighbors. No one stops to see her in Delancey: the residents of Chinatown don't care about Banksy, it seems.
The dog pissing in the hydrant
However, those of the modern and hipster Lower East Side do crowd around the latest (at the time) discovered by the artist, the largest and most spectacular graffiti yet at 159 Ludlow Street taking advantage of a car and a wall. In the audio guide you can hear part of the Manning and Wikileaks case.
Ludlow Street graffiti
Two days after discovering it, it was still practically intact. The one with the best luck so far. By the time I get to 66 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, the door where Banksy wrote a phrase from Plato directly has disappeared . If the owner was smart, he will have kept the door and then he will be able to sell it (up to a million dollars has already been paid for his pieces). But he will not be the only one to try to take economic advantage of the Banksy show in NYC: the beaver that he left at 274 Bradford Street, first they tried to tear off the piece of the wall and then some 'clever' people from the neighborhood charged each person who wanted to remove a picture .
Unwilling to pay anyone, and seeing that the Band-Aid heart she drew in Red Hook is already crossed out by Omar (caught red-handed), I head to Chelsea and Midtown to see if there's still any of the public art that revealed the days two and three. And yes, there they are: the dog pissing in the hydrant is still visible, although signed by another . His “This is my New York accent… normally I write like this” is more difficult to find, under a thousand signatures, it is practically crossed out.
While I'm there, he uploads a new notice to the web and his Instagram: The Sirens of the Lambs is a truck full of stuffed animals who scream and cry and, as he says, will tour the Meatpacking District (the neighborhood of the old slaughterhouses) first and the rest of the city later, for two weeks. Of course, the PETA association has loved it. But nothing, no matter how much I wait and search, I can't find it. Although others have more luck: some even tried to always have the truck controlled with the help of a tracker. A New Yorker cheating on this gymkhana. Bad. You've been caught. And now to continue playing legally like the rest.
The truck full of stuffed animals
As I write these lines, two days later, Banksy has released two new works: Concrete Confessional, the template of a photo of a Jesuit , a photo originally from 1955, which he has painted on a building site in the East Village (7th and Cooper Streets). And Central Park, with which both I and all New Yorkers, citizens or visitors, are pulling our hair out: yesterday he sold works signed by him in one of the stalls in the streets surrounding the park in Manhattan , at 60 dollars: throughout the day only three people bought the canvases with some of his most famous templates.
The successful Banksy flea market
This week we come to the halfway point of the game. Having missed the opportunity to have a Banksy in our homes, the prize is still getting to the piece on time. And maybe also see Banksy himself, even if you don't know who he is, because no one knows his identity, or his face, or his voice that he was responsible for distorting in the great documentary about him, Exit Through the Gift Shop . But, yes, while you are taking photos of his work, he may be taking a photo of you looking at his work. . As he acknowledged to The Village Voice he is living in New York this month. “The plan is to live here, react to things, see places and paint on them. Some will be quite elaborate, others will be a doodle in a bathroom."
And why New York? Why this game board? For the same reason that almost all of us come here, at any time of the year, (and more so in autumn). For the food, the walks, the hidden places. And now, also for Banksy. “All graffiti artists want to prove ourselves in this city” continued in the free newspaper. “I chose it because of the high foot traffic and the number of hidden places . Maybe I should go somewhere more relevant, like Beijing or Moscow, but the pizza there is not that good.”
Amen. And let the game continue!