Why the Banksy show hands Glasgow vital cultural capital

A brief recap, if you’re just back from holiday or were too entranced by the Boris Johnson Is A Liar And Now We Can Prove It Show to notice what was happening. Last week, as revealed exclusively in The Herald, the iconic, globe-trotting, spraycan-wielding will-o-the-wisp street artist known only as Banksy opened his first solo show in over a decade – at GoMA.

There isn’t a museum or art gallery boss in the world who wouldn’t have chewed their own arm off (or traded a Vermeer) to land a Banksy show. But the Bristolian chose Glasgow because he deems the omnipresent traffic cone on the Duke of Wellington’s bronze bonce to be sublime in the sense that only a true work of art can be. Titled CUT & RUN, the exhibition opens today and runs until August 28.

Interesting timing. One way to see it is that it allows summer visitors to Edinburgh to truck on over the M8 for the day, take in an exhibition which is quite rightly making headlines around the world, then exit through the gift shop (to borrow the title of Banksy’s 2010 documentary about street art) and back to the capital.

After all, where blockbuster exhibitions are concerned Glasgow has long been in Edinburgh’s shadow on account of that city's four-strong National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) estate: Modern One and Two, Portrait and National. It’s five really, if you chuck in the Royal Scottish Academy, which sits in front of the National at the foot of the Mound. But let’s not quibble over numbers. It’s a lot of galleries with a lot of wall space and a great deal of over-priced carrot cake.

In normal years – none of the last three in other words – NGS exhibitions notch up well over 2.5 million visits annually as tourists and locals flock to blockbuster shows featuring artists such as Bridget Riley, Paula Rego, David Bailey and MC Escher, as well as ones who don’t need more than a single name: Caravaggio, Picasso, or Vermeer’s contemporary Rembrandt.

This year’s crowd-pleasing summer offering is a massive retrospective of the work of Turner Prize-winning potter Grayson Perry.

But another way to view it is that perhaps those Banksy fans who travel to Glasgow to see this collection of his work – and that’s a constituency far wider than the usual gallery-going demographic – may deign to visit Edinburgh at some point too.

You see Banksy in Glasgow says something Perry in Edinburgh doesn’t. It says that the same spirit which imbues the street artist’s work – a blend of resistance, mischief, contrariness, anti-authoritarianism and, of course, humour – is to be found in Glasgow. It says the balance is shifting, and in Glasgow’s favour.

That’s not to say there aren’t tensions between what Banksy likes about Glasgow and what the city authorities want for the place. Sure, a Facebook campaign and a petition raised a decade ago scotched attempts by the council to stop the habit of traffic-coning the victor of the Battle of Waterloo. But doubtless there are some who would still like to see the tradition stopped, who still believe the practice reflects badly on the city. Depending on which way you turn out of Queen Street station, old conehead is one of the first things you see – depending on how you feel about respect towards Old Etonian ex-Prime Ministers, it may really cause you offence. As we know, some people are awfully funny about statues.

An exhibit at street artist Banksy's show at GOMA in Glasgow (Image: Colin Mearns/Newsquest)

So yes, there are strong elements of conformism in the city’s psyche, particularly where religion and politics are concerned. But Glasgow’s essential character is one of non-conformism, and its natural resting state (to quote Gerry Cinnamon in his song Diamonds In The Mud) is “mayhem.”

Proper art is work that questions, annoys, shocks and provokes. So proper art loves mayhem, which is why it deserves an unruly host. Glasgow is perfect.

Of course the city has always produced great artists. A steady stream of Glasgow School of Art (GSA) graduates have either won or been nominated for the Turner Prize over the last quarter century. Many of them pursue international careers while still living in the city. But when it comes to career-spanning retrospectives then historically it has been Edinburgh which has done the honours.

And let’s not forget either that where visual art intersects with civic pride and global standing, Glasgow has not had its troubles to seek recently. Exhibit A: the fire which destroyed GSA’s iconic Mackintosh Building in 2014. Exhibit B: the fire which torched the £35 million rebuild four years later.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons, whose work as design duo Timorous Beasties has more than a whiff of Banksy to it (see their Glasgow toile, where a bucolic parkland scene is disrupted by a baseball-capped youth urinating against a tree).

In common with all Glaswegians, and all their fellow GSA graduates, they were saddened by what happened (twice) to the Mack. More than that, however, they could see what it had done to the morale of the city and to its sense of self-worth.

Banksy redresses that balance. Banksy, I think, sets Glasgow on its feet again. It tilts the Scottish art world towards it, and away from Edinburgh. In fact it might not be too hyperbolic to say we will look back on a pre- and post-Banksy period. His wouldn’t be the first art show to energise individuals or even entire communities, to bring cultural vigour to a place and for that to have a lasting impact. Ripples spread outwards, remember.

The old Velvet Underground adage applies here: not many people bought the New Yorkers’ 1967 debut, with its Andy Warhol-designed front cover, but everyone who did went out and formed a band.

CUT & RUN lands with more of a splash than the Velvets’ first album, but if even two, five, eight kids feel the heat of Banksy’s simmering anger then the baton passes. And they will never forget how, when and – importantly – where it happened.

Still with balance, this time of the credit and debit sort. When the Amsterdam show closed on June 4, its sixteen-week sell-out run had drawn 650,000 visitors. It could have been twice that number had the Rijksmuseum been able to accommodate them. Entrance cost £25 and the exhibition catalogue was priced at £29. The museum sold 100,000 copies, by some margin a Rijksmuseum record. Total profit? A little over £19 million.

Factor in the wider tourism spend from the 45% of visitors who weren’t Dutch – there’s all sorts of ways to be parted from your cash in Amsterdam, as any stag or hen party knows – and it’s easy to see the financial benefit of this sort of cultural event. If Glasgow sees even a fraction of that it will be a serious boost to the local economy.

Banksy and Glasgow? A real game changer. A wallet packed with cultural capital and a synergistic artistic interaction such as does not come along very often. Now sit back and watch the sparks fly.

READ MORE: BANKSY IN GLASGOW REVIEWED