BANKSY vandalized someone’s HOUSE?!

Hello everyone, welcome back to BUYAMARA. This is a weekly news show where we'll look at some of the weird, strange, and downright odd things that happened this week in the art and history fields. This week we Oh, I'm your host and personal curator, Amara Andrew.

I guess I'm still not used to this new intro. Sorry. So anyway, this week we're going to be talking about how to remove Banksy from your home, how subatomic particles found an ancient underground city, yet another expensive sculpture destroyed in Florida, and an AI-generated sculpture that was deemed a mega fail.

We have all that and more coming up on this episode of BUYAMARA, so let's get to it.

Well, hello. Welcome to the show. This is BUYAMARA.

By now you may know that or if you're listening for the first time, hey. Normally at this part of the show I do updates. I actually don't have any on any of the stories we've talked about previously.

I mean, last week we talked about the Supreme Court ruling against Andy Warhol and everything and the outcome of that, which was really fascinating. This week has been pretty quiet in terms of art and history news. Like news, why'd I say it like that?

For updates for things that we've talked about in the past. So, it's also just been kind of a boring week for me. I've just been recording with a lot of clients this past week, which has been fun, but then also this week I have a lot of recordings.

So, it's just like it's a lot of recording with people, which is totally fine, obviously. That is what they're paying me to do, so I'm totally fine with it. It's just been a lot a lot of motion and a lot of things going on.

So, I haven't even had time to like collect my thoughts, necessarily. But it's been really fun. I really enjoy it.

In case you have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, for my business, MAVEN, that I do, that's like my

One of my full-time sort of gigs. But I do social media videography, so I help people record videos for their Instagram, TikTok, whatever, and then also like YouTube. So, I do short form, like 60 seconds and under, and then long form, which is like anything over 60 seconds.

And it's been really fun. We're trying to get a little bit more creative with some of my clients' stuff and it's been, I don't know, it's been really neat. Tomorrow I have a really cool shoot.

We're going to be doing, I don't quite know, normally my clients have some sort of an idea and I'm like, "Yeah, sure. We'll just We'll figure it out as we go," which is kind of fun. I don't know, it's like the creative thing.

But we have a fun one tomorrow where I think it's going to be a promo and we're shooting it in a bar.

I have no idea. It'll be fun. I'll I'll let you know how it went next week.

And then I have one of my clients, she also does luxury garden design, so I'm going to film one of the groundbreakings for that, and then I have something else this week, too. I don't quite remember. I'll have to look at my calendar.

I live by my calendar. I'm one of those people where if it's not on my calendar, it doesn't exist. So, literally every single thing I need to remember, I put there so I don't have to remember it, cuz otherwise that would be a fucking nightmare to have to remember everything.

I'm I'm very much a to-do list person. When I worked in my day job, my office job at UIC as an archivist, I had like sticky notes all over my desk for like pertaining to different collections and different things I needed to do regarding

Different things and I don't know, I'm I'm a sticky note fiend. So, anyway, you're just like, "Can you just shut up and get to this the show?" which I will, so just bear with me. I think that's actually about it.

I don't really have any other updates, so your wish is granted. I think we'll just get straight into the show. Nope, I lied.

I had one more thing I wanted to talk about. Since I've moved to the Midwest, I've realized that the weather has become one of my favorite things to talk about, which is very unfortunate because I used to make fun of people for doing that. It is finally nice here.

I live in Chicago and it's almost or tomorrow, as of this recording and like coming out, it'll be June 1st. So, it's finally nice. It's finally like 80° and sunny, so I'm very happy.

I have my little

Beachy, you know, cuz I live in Chicago, which is beachy capital. But I have my little beach tank top on with my little palm trees, so you can tell it's it's getting to be summer. It's like one of my favorite shirts.

I wear it all the time. You can see this basically in any of my photos. It's insane.

I wear it all the time. So, anyway, now let's just get straight into the show.

So, for most art lovers, having a piece of artwork from a very famous celebrity artist created for your very own home would be an absolute dream come true, right? Well, what about if the piece is created on your home? That's exactly what happened to a couple in Suffolk.

In 2021, two homeowners woke to find that on the side of their home was a giant seagull, mid-swoop, so, wings up, I'm pantomiming it if you're watching this, there's a giant seagull, mid-swoop, that's alleged to have been created by Banksy. And there's a dumpster below it that's just filled with things, so it's kind of like the bird is swooping down to steal whatever is in it, almost like how a seagull would steal like a French fry on the beach or something like that, which, fun fact, I learned in a book that I was reading this week, it's

Roman Wasn't Built in a Day, it's all about food history and where certain terms came from and blah, blah, blah, it's really fascinating, but according to the book, we by now, most of us know that French fries are from Belgium, but the French part of it may actually talk about the style of the chopping of the fry. So, fun fact, but anyway, we are not talking about French fries, we are talking about art.

This particular artwork, this seagull, was part of what some are calling a Banksy, quote, "art-making spree," where he created a bunch of murals and installations across five across five coastal English towns in 2021. And these ranged from the seagull mural that I talked about, there was also another one that was an arcade skill crane game that looked like it was about to pick up like pluck passersby up, and then there was also a miniature cottage that was added to the Merrivale Model Village that had a rat stencil and also the world words, "Go big or go home." And like I said, it was a model village, so it's very tiny, little cottages.

It's kind of like in Disney, like the Storybook Land Canal, if you've ever been on that ride, but it was tiny little cottages and just on the side, it was, "Go big or go home," which I find very amusing.

Anyway, the seagull itself was nearly, or is nearly, rather, 20 ft high, according to some articles that I read. And while the couple was initially happy to have this one-of-a-kind Banksy piece, and they were quoted as sounding pretty jazzed about it, it's actually turned into a huge nightmare of a problem and for many different reasons, one of them being that they've had numerous vandals trying to do a wide variety of things to the mural itself, ranging from painting over it to chipping pieces off of it.

So then, the couple who owns the home actually hired a security guard to be there overnight to keep watch over the mural cuz they wanted to preserve it as best as possible. They also had issues with city council members. It wasn't elaborated upon what exactly that meant, but I could imagine it's a nightmare.

The main problem, though, that is plaguing them is the decision to either keep it on their house, which is a little creepy because then you have people constantly coming up to look at your home and be where you're living. That's a little unsettling, it could be, especially if you have random people trying to chip away at it.

It's like, "Whoa, whoa. That's my wall."

So, they were trying to figure out if they were going to keep it on their home or if they were going to get rid of it. And either way, whatever they chose was going to be super costly. Eventually, they did decide upon removing it from their home and it's a 22-ton mural, so this is a huge undertaking.

It's been an entire process. So, so far within the process of removing it, they've had it reinforced with 12 layers of resin, fiberglass, and 5 tons of steel. That is quite a lot of stuff.

The couple hopes to sell it to offset the cost, which apparently is going to be over $250,000 US, I'm assuming cuz it was in dollars, $250,000 to remove it from their house. I would hope that they would be able to get some sort of money for it. I personally don't know what I would do if there was a Banksy on the side of my house.

I think I would be very disconcerted with having a bunch of people coming to look at it, because it is an artwork from a famous artist, like a mural. It's a public art piece, but I'd still be like, "Yeah, but this is like my house. I don't really want people coming here to look at it." It would be really cool, though, to have it.

I'm not going to lie, cuz you'd be like, "Oh, my god, my house was chosen."

I have no idea how I would feel, but what I also want to point out about this, though, is that this isn't the first piece of Banksy wall that's been sold or that will be sold. In 2021, so the year that the massive seagull was created, the massive seagull, a mural of a young girl using a bike tire as a hula hoop was removed from a brick wall in Nottingham and was sold for six figures.

It wasn't disclosed exactly how much, I couldn't find that and I tried to read a few different articles, but it just said six figures. So, I think that's why this couple with the seagull are thinking that they could get maybe around a quarter of a million dollars. There was also another piece of wall back in 2009 called Heart Boy.

This was created on a building that was scheduled to be demolished, so then the mural was preserved prior to the demolition of the building. Building was gone, bye-bye. So, TL;DR, if this seagull goes to auction, I will let you know.

I'll have a little update for you on how much money it actually sold for. But yeah, so stay tuned.

Ha. I did it this time. I didn't get too into the music.

I was listening to it, but then I was just like, "No, pull yourself out of it, lady." So, anyway, so for this story, in recent episodes, we have talked a lot about the intersection of technology and art history. This one is really fascinating. A lot of people, I know I say that about like basically everything we fucking talk about, but a lot of people think that all these disciplines have absolutely nothing to do with each other, specifically technology with art history, interchangeably.

But this is really fucking sweet. In Naples, Italy, researchers use subatomic particles to find an underground ancient city.

I mean, my god, how fucking cool does that sound? Archaeologists have known about this for years, but they were unable to access it until now. The area was first called Cuma or Cumae.

I've seen both pronunciations, so we'll just I'll call it Cuma for the purposes of this, so don't be an asshole. Cuma was the first ancient Greek colony on the mainland of Italy, founded in the 8th century BCE. It later became a Roman city, and throughout its kind of lifespan, I guess, it had its own forum, temples, and underground catacombs.

Today, these ancient structures are 33 ft below Naples, so obviously they were unreachable to archaeologists.

But this is where it gets really interesting, so stick with me. It's going to get a little sciencey, but I'm going to try to break it down as best as I can. Again, I'm not a fucking scientist, obviously, so just bear with me.

With the use of subatomic particles called muons created by cosmic rays in the Earth's atmosphere that can pass through solid matter, and a photosensitive film, archaeologists were able to identify, without having to dig, a burial chamber that dates between the 6th and 3rd centuries BCE. I mean, my god, this is so fucking cool.

I love this. Because cosmic rays come from within the Earth's atmosphere, the researchers had to find a spot below their target area to record how the muons scatter. This means that they had to travel almost 60 ft underground, so, again, 33 ft is where this

City was, but then they had to go even further, like I just mentioned, to a 19th century cellar where they could place the muon detection devices. Over a period of 28 days, the devices recorded the muon flux or the movement of the particles in the area over time. There were 10 million muons recorded and that revealed a 6 and 1/2 by 11 ft structure or about 2 m by 3 m.

The only downside, though, is that the device itself isn't able to detect very small things, so it couldn't detect bones and things like that, so it's not quite clear how many bodies are in there, if there are bodies in there, any bones, anything else that was buried with the dead. So, that's like that's to be figured out eventually in the future.

But they now know that this chamber actually does exist or there's some sort of empty pocket of some sort underground.

This process, called muography, has been used previously to also reveal other hidden historical structures, like an ancient entrance to the Pyramid of Giza, and then to also find fuel in a reactor from the Fukushima nuclear power plant. It's just really cool. I love seeing this intersection in this utilization of technology in various different formats.

I know technology is a very broad term, but just being able to see how we can kind of mix science with the arts and history and things like that, it's just It's really cool, and it's super helpful. And it also shows that you need to have an interdisciplinary approach, I think, especially if you're trying to do art history and stuff like that.

I don't know, I wish I learned about this in my schooling, but everything is way more interdisciplinary than we think it is, especially going to school and everything. So, I don't know, just get curious, I guess, is all I mean. So, on to our next story.

This next story is even more wild considering I just talked about something like this in episode 30. This is now what, episode 35? So, a couple weeks ago, I talked about a woman in West Palm Beach, I believe it was West Palm Beach or Palm Beach, one of them, whatever, some sort of Palm and Beach, "Hey, maybe that's why I'm wearing this shirt." but she destroyed a $3 million Damien Hirst sculpture in somebody's backyard.

This one's a little less wild, I mean well, no, it's still pretty fucking wild, I'm not even going to try to be stupid about it. So, again, we are in Florida, though. We are talking about Wilton Manors, which is just north of Fort Lauderdale, just to kind of give you an idea of where we're talking about.

A 49-year-old man purposely drove into a nearly 14 ft blue sculpture of a rabbit called Thunderbunny, which was created by artist Hunt Slonem.

The subjective value of this sculpture wasn't estimated to be as high as the Damien Hirst one, which was $3 million. This one was $300,000, but it's still very expensive. Also, what's different about this one is that this was a public sculpture, meaning that it was in a park in well, okay, I'm getting ahead of myself, let me just tell you the facts.

So, the guy that did this, the 49-year-old man, he admitted to vandalizing yet another piece of art a few weeks prior, also. This was, again, another public sculpture and this one was of a giant popsicle kind of stacked all together, by Craig Berube Gray. So, back to Thunderbunny, which I love that fucking name.

If I ever became like a stripper or something like that, I think I would want that to be my stage name. "Please welcome to the stage, Thunderbunny." Back to the art.

In the footage of the attack on Thunderbunny, the guy crashes into the sculpture, which shakes it. You can see it visually shake on the footage. The guy then gets out of his car, checks for damage, walks around his car, puts his front bumper back on, which has fallen off, by the way, so that tells you how hard he hit it or what a piece of shit he was driving, or what a piece of shit he is.

Anyway, he puts his bumper back on and then he flees the scene of the crime. And like I said, Thunderbunny is this 14 ft, about 14 ft, tall, it's like 13 and some change, foot tall sculpture of a bunny. It's made of 6,500 pieces of blue glass and it took about a year to make.

It was installed in May 2022, so it was still pretty new. It only made it about a year there. It was scheduled to be displayed at a botanical garden next cuz it was just on loan, but then, obviously, those plans are now stalled.

When Hunt Slonem, the artist, found out about the destruction of his sculpture, he was rightfully upset, cuz, I mean, why the fuck would anybody do this? He is either currently or was on site, assessing the damage and trying to figure out, you know, how to how to fix this and how to be able to repair it if it can be. I have no idea if it's going to be able to.

I don't even know what's going to happen because, apparently, it's sustained heavy structural damage, so that sounds pretty much like he's going to have to make a new one, which is it sucks. It's fucking stupid. What's also really weird about this, you might think that this was like a politically-involved attack because we kind of know what's going on with Florida.

I'm not going to get into it, fucking Google it yourself. But, according to the person who did this, he told police that he targeted the artwork because the park it resides in was named after the former mayor, Justin Flippen, and he blamed him, quote, "for the birds we hear."

I mean, that's pretty fucking ironic given what a Cuckoo this guy is, like, what the fuck? This is even more ridiculous because Slonem is known for his absolute love of birds. I think I read that he had 80 to 100 birds in his aviary or something fucking wild like that.

Like, this guy like, I hate birds, personally. I do not like birds. The artist himself loves birds.

It's all just very weird. Like, this doesn't even feel like it makes sense. Florida's just a whole other world.

It just doesn't make any sense, so, anyway. So, all around, it's just a very weird, terrible story. The guy who did this is currently in custody for both instances of where he destroyed public art.

I just really hope that Hunt can fix this sculpture because that is absolutely terrible. And I hope maybe, you know, people can help out or something and make it a community thing. I don't know, I'm just

Woo-woo, so. On to our next and final story.

Nowadays, you can basically do anything with the help of AI. You can plan out your grocery list, you can write some code, you can even write pithy titles for your art news podcast. But can you create 3D sculpture?

Well, apparently, a lot of people are saying no to Stockholm's Impossible Statue. This is a 5 ft tall, half-ton, stainless steel sculpture that's on display at the Tekniska museet, and apologies for mispronunciations as always, the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology. The design itself started with using 2D AI tools, so like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.

They were all trained to incorporate the basic kind of like stylistic approaches and intricacies of five different artists. So, they this is from what was used, I guess, to train the models, the tools rather: Michelangelo's off-balance posing, Käthe Kollwitz's expressionist feeling,

Rodin's musculature, and I think like shininess, as well, was one of the terms, Boccioni's focus on movement and momentum, and Savage's defiance. So, it was all of these various different things that were plugged into the tools and then to spit out some sort of plans. These were then plugged into 3D AI interpreters, as well as new proprietary tools that were developed by Sandvik Machining or, yeah, Machining Solutions.

And apparently, thanks to using this AI technology, the amount of steel that was needed for the sculpture was cut in half. Where I'm getting to all the hatred for this, though, a lot of critics, in one specific article I read, they called it a fine sculpture, but not in a nice way. They just said, "Yeah, it's fine, I guess." And they even said that it looked like it could be a high-end hood ornament for Elon Musk's next spaceship.

Funny, but mean. Personally, I think they're being way too critical. I think it's really cool to be able to do this, first and foremost.

Like, we are in the future, whether you fucking like it or not. I think it's a really fascinating way to be able to make art. Like, myself, personally, I would, mentally, because I'm still kind of stuck in old-fashioned thinking, I would personally prefer a piece of artwork made by a human just because I would sense that it would still have some sort of like, quote, "human soul" attached to it, or some sort of meaning, or emotion, or thought, or expression of some sort.

I really like expressionist artwork, like I love Käthe Kollwitz, but I really like expressionist sort of things, because then it's like, "Oh, okay. There's like some sort of emotion behind it." But if it's something made by AI, or if it's AI-generated or AI-created, does it still have emotion to it? Not in the same way that humans do, but would we actually be able to tell?

When I first saw the sculpture, I didn't know it was created by AI. I purely just looked at the image. I don't know, I thought it looked really cool.

It kind of reminded me of Umberto Boccioni, who is a futurist, I believe a futurist, yeah, he was part of the futurist movement, and he did a lot of exploration of the human figure in doing motion and various different things like that. And he has one particular sculpture, which this kind of like reminded me of it a little bit, because there is a motion to it.

So, anyway, I think people are being very critical of it just because it's AI-created and generated. I do think that there is room for AI-generated and AI-created artwork. It's kind of like when photography was first created, it wasn't viewed as an art form.

It still kind of isn't to this day, to be quite honest, but it's still an art form. It's just different from painting. It's just a different way of getting to something, because you still have to create prompts and there is an art form to it,

But not in the same way that we generally think about visual arts, specifically. I don't know, I do think that there is room at the table for it, for sure. I mean, why the fuck not?

And I think it should be up to the consumer to be able to choose what they want instead of just being like, "Well, no, you don't want that because it's hideous." Like, I actually think it's a really cool-looking sculpture, personally. People think it's fucking hideous. I think it's neat, but again, I'm not in the fine arts, I'm not I'm not a fine art snob, I'm not an art critic, I don't give a fuck enough, to be quite honest, so I just I think people are very pessimistic in general just because it's AI, so we got to we got to get off our high horses and just appreciate the art.

And, yes, it'll be different, but you can at least appreciate the mastery of creating something using these new technologies and tools and things like that. I don't know, just don't think of it as being human-created, because we need to look at it from a different lens, I think. Anyway, I could just go on and on and on, but I will I will spare you my rhetoric.

Let's just make room at the table for everything and everyone. So, anyway, that will do it for this episode of BUYAMARA. Let me know how you feel about the sculpture in the comments below.

Just let me know what you think and feel. I'm very curious. I personally think it's pretty cool.

I think the entire mechanics of it are cool, but then, you know, once it kind of just becomes old news, I think it'll just be like, "Oh, okay. Cool." Anyway, so that's it for the show. Again, thank you so much for listening and watching.

I hope you really appreciated it, or I hope you liked it. I appreciate it. I hope you liked it.

I appreciate you. You are wonderful and I hope you have a great rest of your week or start of your week or whatever the fuck you're doing. I hope you have a great life.

Like this episode if you liked it. It really does help, so thank you so much if you're doing that. I love you and I really appreciate it.

Subscribe if you like this show. If not, I'm sorry. I hope you get through whatever it is that you're getting through.

And I'm Amara Andrew. Never stop creating.