Someone claiming to be the person who vandalized two Banksy graffiti pieces along Main Street just before New Year’s has posted a video online purporting to show him as he attacked one of the artworks.
The video was posted to YouTube on Jan. 4 by a person identified as Ricardo Cabeza. It is headlined “Park City, Utah Banksy Kneeling Angel Boy Destruction Video.” It had received 74 views by Friday morning. Nobody had given the video a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down by then.
In a written statement that appears with the video, the person who posted it calls the Banksy pieces “vandalism spray paint.” The statement also challenges the dollar figure of the damage to the pieces reported in the media, estimated to run into the thousands of dollars.
“The only thing done was Ricardo’s art which is spray paint over top of Banksy’s vandalism spray paint. They are such hypocrites out in Park City because for the first year people lobbied to have the graffiti removed. Now since they’re making money on tourism they embraced this dangerous tagger who is hoping to subvert this free United States and replace it with a communist dictatorship,” the statement says. — Utah Park Record
This is not the first time a Banksy exhibition has been vandalized — since his work has been exhibited in October, there have been four other incidents — but this is the first time the vandal(s) left a statement specifying that the destructive act is as legitimate a work of art as Banksy’s famous defacing graffiti. Turn about and all that. How this becomes communist subversion is a bit harder to decipher.
Hey thanks for the update from the Utah Park Record.