Renowned street artist Banksy tags Detroit, ignites controversy

AUTOBLOG RSS feed ^ | 07-15-2010 | Jeremy Korzeniewski

[Krankor]

Why is the kid in the painting wearing a burka??

I believe the lad is wearing a 1920's professional football helmet he probably found lying around in the rubble.

[Mr. Blonde]

As I recall, despite the money it brought in, the mayor of Baltimore was not a fan of The Wire shooting on location.

I don’t know if that was about a cut, but I’m sure it did not help the already struggling image of the city.

[KosmicKitty]

Oh, duh. I should have known, I find those things laying around all the time :-)

(Still, if the kid remembered the Packard plant being trees, the kid would have to be about 130 years old - the football helmet would be an anachronism, would it not?)

[La Lydia]

Motel of the Mysteries ping...
It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson’s incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization....
http://www.amazon.com/Motel-Mysteries-David-Macaulay/dp/0395284252/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279550972&sr=8-1

[blam]

Hey!!!

That's George Blanda

[lack-of-trust]

in what is a thin slice of irony, there IS a tree growing just two feet to the left of this “artwork”.

You can see it in one of the other pics (guy with shovel clearing debris)

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2010/07/banksydetroit.0a41c4ca93a840c99f7004c376352165.jpg

[a fool in paradise]

British-born and highly-secretive street artist Banksy recently descended on the decrepit Packard plant, leaving his mark behind in the form of an image of a young boy holding a can of red paint. Beside the boy are the words"I remember when all this was trees."

The artwork is a cliched lie.

[a fool in paradise]

I always wondered how the great cities of the ancient world could end up abandoned, unused and buried.

[a fool in paradise]

So they don’t know “who owns it”. No one must be paying the property taxes on it then. Seize it for delinquency.

[lack-of-trust]

Yes, the City of Detroit could sieze it for unpaid taxeds... but then what?

It will cost hundreds of thousands to fence the site and tens of thousand annually to maintain the fence.

Demolition will run north of 35 million dollars just to level the land. That doesn’t count the environmental clean-up (lead, PCB’s, Asbestos, Oil, Gasoline, Solvents and Paints).

Even if Detroit could get “free money” from Uncle Sam to do it all, they would then have large empty lot that nobody wants. There is no market for new housing in Detroit and nobody is coming to Detroit to buid a new factory ever again.

[BenLurkin]

[Nateman]

Can you take 20 pound and 10 years off my headshot?

I've done so on my own image. (The writing on the tree was a disappoint to me. It looks too fake.)

[a fool in paradise]

So the city is abdicating their responsibility to the land in the city.

Why have a government at all then? To manage revenue tickets and collect bribes on contracts?

[Tainan]

Tear this down.
Plant it in crops.
Make food.



F**k Banksy.
my US$.02