Banksy Knock Offs - Part 1:

 

 

The final words on Banksy . . .  

Following an earlier post on street art, which mentioned some of the works of Banksy, the anonymous (and now flavour of the day) English street artist, I received the following enquiry:

Hello
I'm a yr 9 Student studying Art am just wondering if you could tell me the size of Banksy's "Follow Your Dreams Cancelled" Artwork on Essex St, Chinatown, Boston.

Thanks.

I don't know the size but it appears to be life size, as this photo shows:

These photos also give an idea of size and show how a Banksy work ends up in some areas:

An article in the online Daily Mail a couple of days ago  is of interest.  It shows photographs of the recreation of some of Banksy’s famed works, using real people, in other words, real life knock offs.

The article is at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2177037/Spot-difference-Banksys-iconic-graffiti-recreated-using-human-models-life-mimics-art.html

with reader comments ranging from “fantastic” to “awful...lifeless”.

I’m in two minds, I found it interesting, clever, but wondered why Nick Stern, the photographer, bothered.  Surely the whimsy and value of Banksy’s work lies in its originality and the messages that are contained within the works.  I agree with those who see Stern’s work as lacking impact and meaning, that they are hollow copies.  My view may not, however, be your view.  I am also posting it because it highlights the uniqueness of Banksy's works and the meanings in .

Stern has previously recreated Banksy’s works, see:

http://nickstern.com/?galleries=banksy

Following is the article with accompanying photographs and the article’s captions for the photographs.  Becuase of the length I have split it into two parts, part 2 tomorrow.

Spot the difference! Banksy's most iconic graffiti recreated using human models as life mimics art

Graffitists the world over aspire to follow in the footsteps of renowned street artist Banksy. 

However, one photographer is taking a different tack entirely and bringing Banksy’s iconic works to life by using real people and objects in place of the originals.  

As a second instalment to his successful You Are Not Banksy series British born photographer Nick Stern has recreated 11 more of the graffiti star’s most famous works.  

Recreation: LA-based photographer Nick Stern is bringing Banksy to life using models and props to recreate the graffiti artist's iconic images. Stern added sprinkler pipe and electrical fittings to a cut down gun to make the gun look as close as possible to a M-60 machine gun LA-based photographer Nick Stern has made good on his word and released 11 additions to his "You Are Not Banksy" series. These new recreations of Banksy graffiti starring real people and objects in place of the drawn originals include an appropriation of an appropriation -- Stern's version of Banksy's version of Keith Haring's barking dog. Stern tells Huff Post Culture he was extra industrious this time, making a machine gun from a sprinkler tube.

Original: Banksy's original shows a young boy holding a machine gun with colourful crayola guns as ammunition

 Take three: This is Stern's recreation of Banksy's take on one of the most famous images from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction

 Stick 'em up: Banksy created this work spoofing John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in the famously violent 1994 cult film  

Determined to create photos as true to the originals as possible, Stern spent weeks scouring the internet to find the right costumes and props. 

Each frame takes two to three hours to shoot but it is finding the props and costumes that is the time-consuming part. I spent weeks searching the internet,’ he said.  

For items too-costly to buy or rent, Stern makes the prop himself.  

He managed to recreate the M-60 machine gun the little boy is holding in Banksy's original by sawing down a similar gun and rebuilding it with sprinkler tube and electrical fittings.  

While he is chuffed with image of the boy with the gun, he told MailOnline that the Pulp Fiction recreation is another favourite.

Life mimicking art: Stern managed to get a real Navy SEAL, holding a paintbrush, to pose for him for this recreation of Banksy's piece, bottom

 Risky: Stern confessed to using a step ladder and editing it out to capture this shot, above, but says he tries to use Photoshop as little as possible

Proverb

   

“The world is a rose; smell it and pass it to your friends.” 

-           Persian Proverb

Internet Quotes

My son Thomas sent me a mobile telephone text message last week that is apt for posting after yesterday’s acknowledgment that I misattributed Parkinson’s Law.  The image sent was as follows:

That image has a number of similar versions on the internet.  There are also similar expressions and themes featuring other people.

 Now you'll have to excuse me, I'm trying to source a quote by da Vinci about photoshopping.

Richard, Peter, Parkinson and Me

 

Byter Richard from Florida took me to task by email in respect of a comment made in yesterday's  Pareto Principle post. 

In that post I had written that: 

·       Dr Peter’s Principle holds that “In a hierarchy, employees rise to their level of incompetence”; and 

·       Dr Peter’s Second Principle is that “Work on a task expands to fit the time allowed for the task”.

Richard writes: 

"I do believe that what you called Dr. Peter's Second Principle was truly Parkinson's Law -- C. Northcote Parkinson. And he did have more than one law.”

Whilst I usually check my facts, I wrote the above using memory as to the authors of the various principles quoted in the post. 

Following are some comments and corrections.

Dr Laurence J Peter is the author of the principle that in a hierarchy, employees rise to their level of incompetence.   

Dr Laurence J Peter

This was covered in an earlier Bytes:

http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com.au/2010/01/laws-principles-peter-principle.html 

The principle was originally advanced as a humorous treatise by Dr Peter and Raymond Hull in 1969 but subsequently came to be applied by others as a realistic and useful office guide and principle.

Dr Peter also advanced corollaries: 

·       Because in time every post is occupied by employees who have reached their level of incompetence and who are therefore incompetent to carry out their duties, "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence."  

·       Furthermore, according to Dr Peter, competent managers will promote competent employees; incompetent managers will feel intimidated by such employees and will dismiss them, set them up for failure or cause them to remain where they are.

The Peter Principle has been contradicted and refuted by various persons:

·       Cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has propounded the Dilbert Principle which holds that organisations systematically promote their least competent employees to management, particularly middle-management, to limit the potential damage they are capable of causing.

Scott Adams

Although his principle is satirical, as are the refutations, nonetheless the principle and the later criticisms do have factual roots and applications in reality. 

According to Adams:

“I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don’t want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren’t in management. That principle was literally happening everywhere.” 

·       Satirist Dolson D Dolson also disputes the Peter Principle but for a different reason.  He argues that that the Peter Principle is faulty in that it is based on the premise that as one rises in an organisation, the greater the level of competence and skill required.   

The reality, according to Dolson, is that: 

o   the higher the management level, the easier the job; 

o   people in the lower and middle levels need to know what they are doing but people in higher levels and management positions can achieve their positions by luck and/or political connections; 

o   persons in the higher positions need little actual ability or knowledge to perform their jobs and can, in fact, rely on the skills of those below them; 

o   those persons can also be demoted, hence attaining their level of incompetence by demotion, it is not necessarily true that they are promoted to that level and remain there.

The author of the law that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion is, as Byter Richard rightly wrote, C Northcote Parkinson. 

Also, as Richard noted, he has propounded other laws and principles, one such law having been the subject of a past Bytes, the Law of Triviality, aka the Bicycle Shed Example: 

“Organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.” 

with the corollary that: 

“The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.”

It can be read at:

http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/laws-of-universe-parkinsons-law-of.html

Herewith is a collection of  C Northcote Parkinson’s laws, including the above:

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion; the thing to be done swells in perceived importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent in its completion.

Expenditures rise to meet income.

Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay.

The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.

If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.

The progress of science is inversely proportional to the number of journals published.

Thanks, Richard.

The Pareto Principle

 

Sometimes one achieves a blinding insight into the hidden workings of the universe by reading a simple principle of explanation.

Some of these have been previously written about in Bytes:

·         The Peter Principle (“In a hierarchy, employees rise to their level of incompetence”).

·         Dr Peter’s Second Principle (“Work on a task expands to fit the time allowed for the task”).

·         Occam’s Razor (“The simplest explanation is usually the best one”).

·         The KISS Principle (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”).

·         The 6 P’s (“Prior planning prevents piss poor performance”).

·         Murphy’s Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible time”).

It still fascinates me that such profound truths become self evident when pointed out in a simple, easy to understand format.

Thus when Hofstadter’s Law is explained – “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account – it all becomes clear as to why deadlines are unable to be met or one feels that one is always behind on the scheduled times and task.

So it is with another Law of the Universe, one known as the Pareto Principle.

What is it?

Also known as the 80-20 Rule, the Law of the Vital Few and The Principle of Factor Sparsity, it holds that in many situations and for many events and circumstances, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. 

Developed by Joseph Juran, he gave it the name Pareto Principle after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.  Juran identified the principle when he observed that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.

Joseph Juran (1904-2008)

Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923)

How does it work? 

The principle is based on the fact that most things in life are not distributed evenly.  Each unit of time, or work, does not contribute the same amount.  Most things are not 1/1, where each unit of “input” (effort, time, labour) contributes exactly the same amount of output. 

Pareto’s first observation in 1971, that 80% of Italy’s wealth was held by 20% of the population, caused him to investigate other countries.  His enquiries showed that a similar distribution applied.  A 1992 UN report showed that 20% of the world’s population controlled 82.7% of the world’s income. 

The 80-20 rule also applies to the 80-20 subgroups.  Thus we find that 80% of the world’s wealth is vested in 20% of the population, but that within the top 10 persons, the top 3 have as much wealth as the next 7 persons combined. 

What are some examples? 

·         20% of the input creates 80% of the result

·         20% of the workers produce 80% of the result

·         20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue

·         20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes

·         20% of the features cause 80% of the usage

·         80% of sales time is spent on 20% of the customers, not necessarily the profitable 20%

·         80% of the traffic in town travels over 20% of the roads

·         80% of benefit comes from the first 20% of effort

·         80% of our personal telephone calls are to 20% of the people in our address book

·         80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers

What is it good for? 

The value of the Pareto Principle is the recognition that most things are not distributed evenly, so that equal allocation of time, labour and resources may not be appropriate in various situations and circumstances. Identify which aspects or activities generate the most results and focus on them. 

As an example, if 80% of a company’s income is coming from 20% of its products, it makes more sense to focus advertising and marketing on the 20%.  Microsoft found that fixing the top 20% of the most reported bugs eliminated 80% of the errors and crashes. 

That is not to say that the other 80% can necessarily be disregarded.  If 80% of an item is built in the first 20% of the time, that does not mean that the remaining 20% can be dispensed with. 

The Pareto principle is a means of focusing attention on main items and activities.  It is an observation only and can be a handy tool but should not replace commonsense. 

The Pareto Principle has been extended to a variety of fields and situations, and to an ever increasing range of cause and effect phenomena. 

Does it always apply?  Is it always 80-20? 

No.  The fact that it is 80% and 20% is coincidental in adding up to100%. Apples and oranges.  It could be 80/20, 90/10, or 90/20, the numbers don’t have to add to 100.  In one situation 20% of the sales staff may account for 80% of the sales, in another it may be that 40% of the sales staff account for 50% of the sales.

Funny Friday

 

(Caution: risque language/humour)

An old lady wakes up one morning to find that there's a gorilla in the tree in her back garden.  She looks in the yellow pages and sure enough, there's an ad for "Gorilla Removers." She calls the number and the gorilla remover says he'll be over in 30 minutes. 

The gorilla remover arrives with his truck which contains a ladder, a pitchfork, a shotgun, a set of manacles, a winch and suspended metal cage, and a large snarling dog with big teeth, wearing a muzzle.   

He sets up his equipment in the back yard, removes the muzzle from the dog and says to the old lady "I'm going to climb the tree using this ladder, then I work my way along the branch and give the gorilla a poke with the pitchfork.  This will force the gorilla to jump down, whereupon this specially trained dog runs up and grabs him by the testicles, holding him immobile until I get down.  I then put the manacles on him, drop the cage over him and take him to the zoo.  They give me a donation and it doesn’t cost you anything.” 

“That would be lovely,” she says. 

“All you have to do is hold the shotgun,” he says. 

“What do I do with the shotgun?” she asks. 

“Lady,” he responds, “If I fall off the ladder, shoot the fucking dog!”

John is paying a visit to the hospital to visit his Italian neighbour who just had a very serious traffic accident. The neighbour is in plaster, completely wrapped in bandages with large amounts of hoses and infusions. He looks like a mummy. John tries to have a conversation but his neighbour has his eyes closed and isn't responding. Suddenly his eyes jump wide open and he starts to gurgle and during his last gasp for air he says: 

"Mi stai bloccando il d'tubicino ossigeno, Pezzo di merda ...."  

John inscribes the words in his heart.  

At the funeral John tells the black-clad widow that her husband had something to say at the end. 

She asks with tearful eyes, "Was it that he loved me? "  

"I do not know," said the man, "but it sounded like ‘Mi stai bloccando il d'tubicino ossigeno, pezzo di merda ....’ “

The widow screams and faints. 

"What?" John ask startled to the daughter, "What did he say?  What does that mean?"  

The crying daughter says: "You’re standing on my oxygen hose, you git."

Corn Corner:

Q: What’s pink and wrinkly and hangs out your underwear?

A:  Your mother.