Yup, That Was a Banksy [UPDATE 4]

Remember that find by Walking and Typing yesterday? Well, it turns out that was a Banksy and it’s parked in the Meatpacking District.

We love this added element of intrigue in Banksy’s post:

We’ll have more for you (location, etc) as the situation evolves, and hopefully people will be able to see this one for free. 😉

Also, yesterday the first Banksy truck showed up at the New York-Historical Society’s Armory at 100 exhibition opening:

And the New-York Historical Society published this video of the work when it stopped by:

Update 1, 12:35pm: Yesterday’s East New York Banksy has been defaced, according to the New York Post:

Update 2, 1:15pm: We asked the New-York Historical Society about the Banksy truck that visited their opening last night and we got this considered response from Valerie Paley,  N-YHS Historian and Vice President for Scholarly Programs: 

OK — so the Banksy truck was outside the New-York Historical Society (on the park side of Central Park West at 77th St.) last night as people were leaving The Armory Show at 100 opening — I happened to be talking about his work to my Columbia museum seminar students just a few hours before so I was really excited about seeing it. Nobody was really aware of what it was. I went home, grabbed my daughter, and went back to see it up close. (Hilarious — the Conservancy rangers were just discovering it at that point and trying to describe it to central command over their walkie talkies. Had no idea what it was, although eventually central command told them, “Oh, yeah, that’s that international graffiti artist.”)

Anyway, my daughter Elianne got some video of the waterfall installation inside the truck, and as we were trying to hail a cab on Central Park West she stealthily snapped a photo of some guys who looked like they might be associated with the truck, lurking quietly in the shadows. When they sort of saw her do that from behind a parked car, they disappeared into the park.

The discussion I had with my museum studies students had to do with something we had been contemplating: do museums need objects? After reading up on Banksy’s installations last week I started to wonder if art objects *need* museums to deepen meaning and interpretation? If you call the 800 number associated with Banksy’s “works,” he clearly pokes fun at standard museum verbiage and interpretation in his acoustiguide sort of stops. (You can hear the audio for each piece on his website, although it’s designed to be listened to while you are standing in front of his work.) Perhaps in a way, this type of thing is the 2013 answer to the shock of the modernist impulses of 1913.

Update 3, 2:24pm: @godVeveryone pointed out this video of Farm Animal Rights Movement’s (FARM) World Farm Animals Day protest in LA, which puts the Banksy work into a real-world context:

Update 4, 4:10pm: It appears that the second Banksy truck piece is in front of the Apple Store on 14th Street: