Local art scene lovers should also be ready to see lines of people ready to participate in the commodification of street art from an artist whose work regularly rakes in millions of dollars at auction (one half-shredded work auctioned for $25.4 million last year). We are a fast growing city eating up candlelit candlelight concert tributes to everyone from Beethoven to Beyonce, after all.
“Banksyland” has plans to be in Tampa on Friday, Nov. 18-20, with 15 daily time slots for entry. Tickets start at $22, but a venue has yet to be announced.
The show is one in a handful of ticketed-entry unauthorized exhibitions of Banksy’s work. Reviews say the show includes “video projections and compilations of the artist’s work, 3-D fabrications of the artist’s 2-D work, photographs of the artist’s street work printed on paper or canvas.”
The Portland stop for “Banksyland”—which obviously has not been blessed by the artist—did include “original street works and components of installations created by Banksy,” which were described as “lifeless in a gallery setting under glass.”
When the show’s curator spoke to On Arts Watch last summer, Elle Miller explained that she hoped that her One Thousand Ways production company would operate as a nonprofit element to the exhibit, but could not explain how the nonprofit would work. A few weeks later the Seattle Times said she’d decided to move away from the nonprofit model, but that “at least 10% of ‘Banksyland’ profits will be given to arts organizations.”
At one point, the ticketing page for the show had a call to action to support Americans for the Arts’ mission with an additional $5. A spokesperson for Americans for the Arts told the Times their organization does not have a relationship with “Banksyland,” which Miller admitted to.
Miller has yet to respond to an inquiry from Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, and we’ll update this post when she does.
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2022.