Sneezing all night.
Photo: Courtesy of @ banksy / Instagram
Artist Banksy recently made his way to the London Underground, dressed as an essential worker spraying surfaces for safety, in order to do An Art ™ ️ about the coronavirus. On July 14, Banksy posted a video on Instagram showing him doing the piece, which is called “If you don’t mask, you don’t understand,” but it should have been called “Tubethumping.” It depicted the artist’s trickster rats using a Circle Line train as a canvas and playground: they sneeze everywhere, wear face masks as a parachute, and label Banksy’s name in “hand sanitizer.” The best part comes at the end of the video, as the sliding doors reveal a cheeky and hopeful play on words: “I lock myself in / but I get up again.” As with other Banksy works, the message is clear: Hit the head with a clear frying pan: Follow blockade measures and wear masks in public places so you don’t spread all your green coronavirus germs. about the place like these positively bubonic rats.
However, the piece’s public good was lost in Transport for London, which took a more “the medium is the message” approach and, being graffiti, removed the piece “a few days ago,” before Banksy revealed it was a true Banksy A Transport for London source told the BBC: “It was treated like any other graffiti on the net,” and that “the job of the cleaners is to make sure the net is clean, especially given the current climate.”
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