The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones reckons that Banksy’s “Girl with Balloon” being voted Britain’s best-loved artwork is proof that we are all stupid. He says real art is “elusive, ambiguous and difficult”, and that Banksy’s stencils are the “artistic equivalent of a tweet”, one-dimensional, crass and obvious.
I say we have been here before with Dadaism, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and countless others. Just because an artist divides the art world and forces it to re-evalute doesn’t make it “not art”. Quite the opposite in fact.
Art critics thought that the Dada movement was a “practical joke”, dismissed Picasso’s work as “schizophrenic”, and labelled Warhol an “aesthetic fraud”. The high-brow are usually the last to understand avant-garde.
