Hah TIL. So it's the river Welsh river on the English side of the Bristol channel.

I often feel like I would understand a lot more names if I bothered learning Welsh. It's pretty popular for made up climbing route names too, because Wales is so good for it I guess. Allegedly some of the classics in the Avon gorge are Welsh derived but I could never figure them out to be sure.

You avon a chwerthin?

The Welsh "afon" derives from the earlier Celtic "abona" meaning "river". Also related to the Celtic "afanc" which was some kind of aquatic monster.

I suppose it's true that the left-wing equivalent is the Palestinian flag, or the centrist equivalent is the Ukrainian flag, however this usually comes in the form of a sticker or the odd flag flown from a house window here and there, rather than a row of flags hung from every lamp post on a street.

Quantity has quality all of its own. Although many different causes use flags for promotion, the obsession that certain elements of the English right have with the English flag is at a completely different level.

Choosing a traditionally suited man as the standard bearer adds a formal banality to the blindness (to my eyes).

He’s a British artist, the sculpture is in London and the phenomenon of raising of St George’s Cross on every lamppost on every roundabout is a recent initiative of the British right. Most people will be linking the statement of this sculpture to this activity.

(I’m more likely to see the white rose of the House of York in “opposition” to the flag shaggers than a rainbow or anything else, in my neck of the woods, but there’s only a few of these flying)

I do like the wider interpretation though, that any ideology can blind you.

Being downvoted for an objective fact. Haha, brilliant.

Idiots.

That just means you're both wrong. "Its location - Waterloo Place, St James's - is an area designed to celebrate imperialism and military dominance in the 1800s", says the BBC. Banksy is from Bristol, where they threw a statue of a slave-trading philanthropist in the river. The statue is wearing a suit. It's not very interpretable. We can wonder whether it's about the Conservative party or the Reform party, but nobody's suggesting it represents Hamas or the CCP.

※ I admit that Xi Jinping wears a suit, but I'm still classifying that theory under "plausible deniability".

Where does the "art is about inciting a response" theory originate from?

I went and looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_art but couldn't find it there. The "anti-essentialist" section is good, though, I think. It has Berys Gaut listing ten properties of art, all of which are nice-to-have but none of which are essential. Then if a piece ticks lots of boxes it's a shoo-in, but if it doesn't tick many of them you can argue about it.

Some of those involve eliciting some sort of response, but you could also have a decorative piece with this combo:

(i) aesthetic, (iv) complex, (v) meaningful, (vi) idiosyncratic, (vii) imaginative, (viii) skillful, (ix) art-shaped, (x) intentional

Which would be 8 out of 10, to which we could add "completely ignorable" and it could still be art. I don't see why attention-grabbing and provocation is important, and it certainly isn't sufficient on its own, plus it's irritating.

Gp said, "it's a hack"

You said, "Whether we think he's a hack", which fundamentally changes what is being discussed.

The only reason we're talking about this is because of Banksy. Not because it is a clever or "deep" piece. It's disappointingly surface level, and the fact that we're talking about that doesn't suggest otherwise.