garry’s posterous

So true.

That's happening with a lot of professions, I think. The ads that are produced these days are really works of art. But they aren't used to say much more than, "Buy me." The promise of money and prestige drains mores noble pursuits, and practicalities of life and the need for a job make that unavoidable. So the question becomes, is it good for us as a society to have efforts in the art of advertisement instead of pure art?

Probably. We're such a hyper-consumer-oriented culture that to a certain extent, it makes sense that our art morphs to reflect 21st century life.

We saw shades of this previously with the pop art movement. Bansky really represents a resurgence in that, recognizing not only that ad / street culture is art, but that there's a message within it.

I think that's the larger aspect of Bansky that speaks to our generation -- it uses the visual language of the street and the advertisement to drive home larger messages about society, injustice, suffering, and hypocrisy.

Check out Adbusters.

Yup.... I find this text to be rather illuminating on the subject [ wikipedia entry quoted below ] :

The The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Chinese: 《文心雕龍》; pinyin: Wén Xīn Diāo Lóng) is China's first work of aesthetics and also the first systematic work of literary criticism from that country. Its author, Liu Xie, composed the work in fifty chapters (篇) according to the principles of numerology and divination found in the Book of Changes or I Ching.