Bunking Off For Banksy

There is one Camera Boy in the office, diligently logging all the material from last month’s African lion trip, Miss Whiplash is on holiday and I don’t want to deal with the expenses sheets.

This morning I made a big pile of bacon sandwiches and a flask of coffee and ran away from those receipts, at 8am I joined my friends, various people armed with books and newspapers and some children playing Snap to queue for a show by our famous local boy vandal.


Banksy has been pursued for decades by 'The Authorities' for graffiti-ing around first Bristol then the rest of the world and now here he is, in our stuffy little museum, he’s filled the entrance hall with a burned out ice-cream van and binge-culture statues staggering around with their dogs and shopping, fairground music playing tinnily in the background. There are his trademark witty stencil pieces, a room of quite disturbing animatronic creatures and all the upper galleries of stuffed animals and old-fashioned paintings in big gold frames have been interfered with, here’s one of the reviews


Proper grown-up critics can dismiss Banksy as An absolute thundering backside, Charlie Brooker refers to his fat-arsed, berk-pleasing rubbishness (a lot of arse criticism then!!) but an entire road has been closed off to accommodate the queues that two months on, are not abating. The lack of subtlety in Banksy’s work is not the point - it’s funny, cartoony stuff done with great panache and a big part of Banksy's charm is that, unlike many artists, he doesn't take himself too seriously. More people have gone through the doors of our, normally moribund, local museum in the last two months than in it’s entire history and I bet the Oxfam shop opposite are still smiling at the anonymous donation they received just before the show.