John Keats, the ingénue English Romantic poet, coined the idea of “negative capability”. He was trying to describe a characteristic of great artists: those who were comfortable of sitting “in uncertainties”.
Mystery and doubt were no great challenge to these people - there was no guiding necessity to reach “after fact and reason”.
In other words, great art needn’t seek moral, political, or philosophical resolution. You can aspire to the so-called sublime, unburdened by such analytical and passé frameworks. Not everything is in search of an answer.
Well, whatever the opposite of “negative capability” is, the semi-anonymous British street artist Banksy has it in spades.
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Forced to think of others (and other things) without “negative capability”, I might describe high school economics teachers; primary school principles; heads of human resources; people who work for McKinsey; JK Rowling’s ethically didactic Harry Potter series and those in charge of the CAO admissions system.
The other side of things is harder to cast, because great artists are rare by definition. But you might look to genuine aesthetes – not those easily swept up by trend and fashion; or Keats and his fellow travellers, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, or novelists who do not just write morally ambiguous characters, but who also pass no comment on their moral ambiguity like Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy and James Joyce.
In this context, I am thinking of Banksy this week because on Monday one of his standard-issue street murals appeared on the external walls of the Royal Courts of Justice in London, the home of the English high court and court of appeal.
It is opposite “Middle” and “Inner” temple, where most of the barristers’ chambers reside. And it depicted a judge beating a protester with a gavel – a helpful visual aid for those who are slow at metaphor. The protester defends himself with a blank placard, supine to the overweening power of the state and the legal system.
It is a comment on the UK’s proscription of Palestine Action activist group as a terrorist organisation, and the series of subsequent arrests. On Saturday, after a demonstration in central London against the banning of the protest group, the Metropolitan Police arrested 857 people under the Terrorism Act. Most were released on bail with court dates pending.
Passive observers were riled by images (as selected by newspaper picture editors) of seemingly peaceful pensioners hauled away by men in hi-viz, accompanied by social media commentary: do you really think these people are terrorists?
A health warning is needed here. I do think that vice-president JD Vance is broadly right when he suggests that Britain is currently suffering a free speech problem; that the country is “back sliding” on positive rights - arresting Graham Linehan for his recent X posts is part of the trend and the same goes for hauling Mo Chara of Kneecap to court.
But if you go to protest the proscription of a terror organisation in support of said proscribed organisation, what did you think was going to happen?
And plenty of attendees were surely not too upset at being arrested – for what is a better fate of an activist than a picture of them hauled away by the authorities? If Banksy wants blatant, undergrad symbolism, then here’s a handy primer for him.
So what about the cartoon gavel about to smash in the head of the cartoon protestor. Rendered well? No, of course not – it’s spray-painted, stencilled graffiti.
Nonetheless, I am minded to defend Banksy. And not just because by Tuesday the mural outside the Royal Courts of Justice was covered up by policemen and by Wednesday it was removed (case and point, one up Banksy). But because he is the constant subject of ridicule by members of the middle brow “aesthete” class who moonlight as our cultural superiors.
His work is juvenile, naive, in possession of gumption with no insight – they say. Just look: Winston Churchill with a Mohawk, two policemen kissing, a military helicopter crowned by a pink bow. Sooooo unserious.
The initial reading is fair: these are brow-beating op-eds that crop up on the street, by an artist who drowns in his own sanctimony and is as establishment as they come (he has a cosy relationship with Sotheby’s auction house and several publishing deals with Penguin Random House, as just two examples).
People like to cultivate status through taste that discredits political “art” as shallow and ambivalently anti-intellectual.
But what about Picasso’s Guernica? Or Caravaggio’s dirty feet foreshortened to look huge on canvas? Anself Kiefer’s thick dredges of oil paint in service of holocaust remembrance? We should not dismiss blatantly political art or easily-parsable symbolism.
There is always a constant search for an art without politics. That is the only stuff that will ever be transcendent. But we also do not need to eschew the material, the literal and the real. Kitsch, sanctimonious and all. Uncomplicated and non-controversial truth is no bad thing, either.
