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Comment by spprashant | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate? I happen to know nothing about Banksy's political views beyond perhaps he is slightly leaning to the left, maybe anti-capitalist?

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> Authorities on Thursday placed safety barriers around the statue as growing crowds of onlookers gathered

The fact that the statue was allowed to stay up means that the authorities approved it. So, Banksy isn't really counterculture, he's government approved counterculture.

It’s hardly Banksy’s fault for getting famous. Was Banksy supposed to stop creating art once it was no longer being washed off and seen as a nuisance?

Your assumption that government power will invariably be (ab)used to oppress messages the people in government do not like is a dynamic of fascism, not a universal truth.

We aren't talking about a painting in a private gallery, it's a big object in the middle of the street. If it was actually unauthorized it would be removed, even if the British government respected free speech. If artists could actually place at night their works and not be removed, the streets would be blocked due to the number of statues. This clearly seems to be a sponsored work with typical Banksy marketing, like the work that got half-shredded at its auction.

Regardless of whether the physical placement was authorized or not, my comment still applies regarding the specific content of the message.

Authorization could be done with permits, or just tacitly by the notability of the artist. And while one can kind of do some handwaving and liken the latter dynamic to some mild corruption, that is still nowhere near the level of motivated corruption under fascism. And at this point comments invoking phrases like "established media" and "global bureaucratic regime" have a general thrust of pushing us away from liberal institutions and towards fascism, so I find those appeals quite disingenuous.

It's nonsense. Reactionaries want to continue hamming up the bureaucratic power structure as the worst thing ever, so people won't focus on the fact that the only solution they are bringing to the table is bog standard autocracy. In reality, bureaucracy has been decent at tempering the exercise of authoritarian power and we've taken that for granted, now at our peril.

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