When the world beats a path to your door …

It won't be because you just lowered the price of your mousetrap.

AI and I playing with images

An old man sat at an artist’s sidewalk booth in Central Park selling small black and white spray art paintings. By the end of the long day, he had only sold eight paintings even at the modest price of $60. Two of them went to a woman from New Zealand.

A world away, a major auction house closed the bidding on a painting at a million+ $US only to have the artist destroy the painting no sooner than the gavel dropped.

The woman from New Zealand went on to sell her small art pieces for enough to help buy a lovely home for her family. And, the woman who bought the shredded piece of art later resold it in its partially destroyed state, for $25 million US.

Some of you probably already know that the artist in common with both of these stories is the famous/infamous street artist, Banksy, and the point of both pranks was to question “value” in the world of art.

Of course, the art world isn’t the only place where value is an illusive, ever-changing concept. It’s just really easy to see the weirdness there.

In the stories above, the woman who found the Banksy paintings in Central Park traded them for a family home; I’m not sure what the anonymous woman with the $24 million gain from the partially shredded Banksy did with her windfall, but my guess is that she had a lot of fun telling the story.

Here in our much less dramatic world of Substack, we talk a lot about value. Writers are encouraged to increase value to readers in order to gin up subscriptions, both free and paid, with paid being of particular interest. And, it makes sense, bills have to be paid and writing is skill or talent that has been developed through school, experience, and years of practice. It is worthwhile work that deserves to be compensated.

But … what is value? And, how do we create it?

In an environment with many players and many fewer “stars,” there is a tendency to advise people to look at what the role models are doing and then follow their lead. I’ve seen posts recommending that we treat our readers like Taylor Swift treats her fans. Great advice … I’d love to send my readers Christmas boxes tailored to their exact delights. For me at least, there are few hitches to that particular strategy.

Other posts come back to engagement … more polls, more questions, and chats, and threads and zoom meetings,  and … and … then do some back flips please.

I’m not an expert on Banksy after watching a 2-hour documentary, but I didn’t see him trying to create value. I saw a kid having fun, doing what he wanted to do even when it made no sense to anyone else. He started using stencils because he could do them faster and run fewer risks of getting arrested. Over time, the kid matured, found his voice and his message, pranked the “art system,” and people began to talk about him.

He did ridiculous things including mounting his own art in major museum galleries … a Mona Lisa with a smiley face, a pastoral landscape blocked off with police “do not cross” tape, cave art with a shopping cart, a sunglass wearing rat in a specimen cage, a dildo among archeological artifacts.

There was a point to his pranks: making fun of the stodgy art system and its ideas about value. The world woke up a bit and began to want more Banksy, whoever he was, and money started flowing in.

The more I saw and read about Banksy, the more interesting he became. But it wasn’t until I read about his work in Palestine that I truly became a fan. (Not enough to buy a Banksy, of course, but enough to think about him as a role model.) He has something to say and he finds wonderfully weird ways to say it.

While maintaining a neutral position on the political part of the Palestine/Israel issue, Banksy has painted works on the West Bank Wall, 440 miles of wall separating Palestine from Israel. Banksy calls this The Segregation Wall and painted “breaks” in the wall.

Banksy: The Separation Wall

He also created the Walled Off Hotel where every room offers a view of the wall. The hotel is now closed because of the current violence there.

I don’t know if Banksy has ever given creative advice, but here’s what I hear him saying to me:

“You only have one thing to give. Give it. Give it your all.”