Playing with photographs at the Natural History Museum…

I went to the Natural History Museum at the weekend, to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. The exhibition was excellent – I’d recommend a visit – but that’s not what I wanted to write about.

But there was one small bit of technology used in the exhibition that struck me as being a great use of the internet, and served to make users advocates and advertisers of the show – willingly. Innovative, too – I’d not seen it used before.

At the end of the exhibition was a desk with a touch-screen, where one could select pictures from the show – and have them emailed to you (or any other email address).

This was very simple to use – more or less drag and drop.

My favourite picture from the show - Light projection, by Michal Budzyński (Poland)

I picked several pictures – it didn’t seem as if there was a limit (if so, it was quite a large one) – and emailed them to me. And of course, I could forward them elsewhere – sharing them (and publicising the exhibition and its photographers).

This simple bit of tech just seemed so neat: I get to look at my favourite photographs later, I can share them. And talk about them! It really engaged people. Whoever thought of this at the Natural History Museum deserves a medal – I wonder if it will catch on at other exhibitions? (And I’m sure you’ll let me know if it is already widely used around the place!)

Back in, front out, by Esa Mälkönen

Off the Wall: why is Banksy so popular?

I went to see the big Banksy show at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery last week. I say I went to see it – but I didn’t: the queue was enormous, occupying a whole side street, and I took one look at the length of it and decided that I really didn’t want to wait in the squally showers to see his work – especially since I could just wander around the streets of Bristol and see some wonderful work by Banksy and other street artists, too.

I had been warned: both the friends I was visiting and the musuem’s website told of hour-long queues. But I was still very surprised.

I go to quite a few art exhibitions – a couple a month, I’d guess – by many world famous artists (and many unknowns, too). I often go to the big blockbuster shows – the big names. And I haven’t seen queues like that to get into the Banksy show before – well, not in the last thirty years that I can recall, anyway.

I was trying to understand why Banksy was so popular – way, way more than any other artist whose work I have tried see. I can’t imagine the Jeff Koon’s show at the Serpentine has queues around the park.

Perhaps Banksy’s popularity isn’t so hard to understand – I wanted to see his work, too. But that it should be so popular is surprising. Those queueing for the show looked like any other exhibition audience – perhaps a little younger, but not much. They didn’t look like they’d been out all night stencilling walls. (Though since I’ve never been out all night stencilling walls myself, I can’t really say what street artsists look like…)

What got me along to the show (if not into it) is the humour and iconoclastic nature of the painting: subverting one’s expectations, attacking the establishment. But there must be a lot of artists who play similar tricks.

But what Banksy does is very much street art: the idea of caging his graffiti and stencilled pieces in an exhibition seems a bit odd. And queueing for the privilege when one can walk along nearby streets and his and others’ work in situ seems positively perverse.

Bristol still has many murals by Banksy and many other artists: they are local landmarks, and what once might have been treated with disdain and scrubbing brushes now add to civic prestige. (I have been told several of Banksy’s pictures in Bristol are now subject to preservation orders.) In a short walk through BS2 I saw many graffiti’ed walls of high quality, at least some of which were attirbuted to Banksy.

Although apparently Banksy, a Bristol Rovers fan, recently made some unwelcome comments about Bristol City football club – whose fans have daubed some of Banksy’s street art with blue, their club’s colour.

[Edit: the panda and the man hanging from the window are both by Banksy. The silhouette of children is apparently by an artist who goes by the name "Fake". I don't know who painted the others. The spaceman is my favourite - especially since today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing!]