BANSKY vs KATRINA New Orleans

Banksy is an emerging graffiti and cartoon artist from London England, has been on my top artist list for the last 5 or 6 years.
I had the pleasure of seeing some of his street art in Amsterdam and London early on in the century.

This piece in-particular is one of my newest favorites though. On a recent trip to the demolished city of New Orleans, Banksy, who is known for exploiting government policies and tyrants, left no stones unturned in ghost land of the once beautiful town.

"Marching Band" in acrylic spray paint done first in stencil on huge sheets of cardboard, stands about 6 1/2 feet in height and is located on an unknown street in the lower 9th ward, in New Orleans Louisiana.

It symbolizes so well the culture of New Orleans and that the music of the City will forever be present in the city. It also depicts that the backbone of N.O will never be broken by the government of natural disaster.

Banksy's art has gone on to influence many in the world and has created a series of chain reactions and similar styles of both graffiti and prints world wide.

Here are a couple more of his pieces from his trip to N.O.















More Banksy:

My favorite thing about this artist, is that he never seeks huge amounts of money for his art. He has never stopped painting illegal walls and his messages are always very clear and very clever.

shipment
The two of them together managed, in record time, to replace the LP with Dangers new Version of Complete remixes of the Paris Album, and revamp the artwork on the cover only slightly, to create a completely different LP. The CD's were then re-shrink wrapped and placed back in the hands of the distributors as if nothing happened.

The pure genius of this scandal, was that the record company that released the LP, also had ties to Danger Mouse's Music, in that if the company sued Danger and Bansky, they in turn would be suing themselves!!!

BRILLIANT!!!!!

When the CD's hit the shelf, a huge uproar was created, Paris was outraged and the papers were calling Bansky a "Guerilla Graffiti Artist" and "menace!"

Here is the Two different covers!

BEFORE





AFTER









FOR MORE BANSKY VISIT

WWW.BANSKY.CO.UK

THE CHICAGO BEAN.

After all the controversy and hype about the chicago "Bean" in the last years, I decided that I would actually get out of the car this time and check it out.

By "controversy" I mean that, when the "bean" was being erected some complained about the amount of money it cost to build the sculpture and many believed that there was a much better way the city of chicago could've spent the millions of dollars.

However, after visiting the "bean" and reading a few articles about the piece, I came to appreciate it a lot more, as do the hundreds of tourists and chicago natives that visit it each day.

The actual name of the piece is the "Cloud Gate" and it was constructed by British Artist Anish Kapoor in 2007.

The cloud gate is a monstrous, seamless, stainless steal "kidney bean" shaped object that sits right in the center of Chicago's new Millennium park. The gate part of it stretches 12 feet high and allows observers to walk underneath the mirror like object and see themselves joined with the beautiful skyline of chicago. (millienumpark.org)

Kapoor's idea for Cloud gate has been said to come from looking at and playing with liquid mercury. You can fully see the resemblance on a clear day when you can see all of yourself, the sky and the skyline reflected back at you.

Unfortunately when i arrived at the bean it was dark out, so the pictures I captured of me and my daughter playing with our reflections didn't turn out too well. The most impressive thing that stood out to me though, was that the entire sculpture does not have one cut, rivet, or seam visible on the entire thing. It literally looks like a drop of liquid mercury and reflections are distorted from side to side depending on your placement around it and perspective.

the 475 million dollar millennium park, is well worth both the money and the visit. Besides the cloud gate "bean" there is a lot more for both enthusiasts and families to check out!