Art Basel has become the annual mecca for the year’s oddball artistic offering. From Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian to MSCHF’s ATM Leaderboard, it is a home for statements in surprising formats. While there has seemingly been a lack of a true headline-maker with intrigue buzzing for it, there’s still a spirit of playfulness to be found in the likes of Ai Weiwei’s Lego masterpieces.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, human rights activist and dissident with a history of speaking out against the regime in his country. This thread in his life traces back to his father, poet Ai Qing, who was exiled to Shihezi in 1961 and forced into physical labour due to his “rightist” values, resulting in a hard life for his family. Ai was arrested in 2011 on several counts of “economic crimes” and detained for months without an official charge. He came out of the experience all the more vocal in his works as a documentarian, architect, and modern artist, his practice encompassing film, photography, and sculpture and his works often depicting a dichotomy of his home country through repurposed Chinese historical objects in modern socio-political contexts.

Now, a massive recreation of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus adorns the walls of Art Basel, built brick by brick. It is joined by a recreation of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. Ai Weiwei’s Lego works are an interesting offering in the artist’s history, whose pieces often have a stark essence and muted palette to them. Yet these works, striking in the same compositional manner that their originals are, are given a jolt of playful essence just by the awareness of their core material.

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Ai Weiwei; courtesy of Yahoo.

But it isn’t for the sake of entertainment that he is using the classic children’s toy for these projects. Having first started working with Lego in 2014, he sought to meld the grand air of these historically significant works and the consumerist modernism inherent to the iconic toy bricks. What’s more, these are not true replications, as Ai has put his own statements in each—a clothes hanger next to Venus, indicative of abortion rights, and Beijing’s National Stadium in the distance from Washington, speaking to his experience designing the building only to have it spur on intense security operations, as well as the Chinese/America relations.

Certainly not evoking the same essence of mischievous play that we’ve seen the last few years at Art Basel, Ai Weiwei’s Lego recreations are perhaps indicative of a positive trajectory. Utilization of novel techniques in an attempt to speak to pertinent current issues, and not easily overshadowed by their form. With the vice grip of NFT culture finally loosening and a desire for substance in dire times, Ai’s work may be just what this year’s event needed.

In a regular reminder that mega-corporations and arts funding are not an ideal mixture, Amazon has cut ties and scrapped their ongoing funding of The Cheech Marin Centre for Chicano Art at the Riverside Art Museum. With word getting out via a leaked document for the company’s 2024 PR and business plans, it is evident that Amazon did not take kindly to the Centre’s exhibition of works critical (well, maybe a bit more than critical) of their methods.

The Cheech of course gets its name from beloved comic actor Cheech Marin, one half of the legendary duo Cheech and Chong, who has become an avid collector of Chicano art. With his collection of Chicano art hailed as possibly the largest in the world, it’s unsurprising that the museum, located in Riverside, California, would want to honour the entertainer and collector—especially after gifting them work. Since its opening in 2022, The Cheech has secured support en masse from the enthusiastic public as well as the city of Riverside and the state of California, to the tune of $800,000 annually and over $10 million, respectively.

But Amazon, who was only granting them a humble sum of $5,000, has put an end to their support due to the work of University of California student Toni Sanchez and her piece BURN THEM ALL DOWN. Displayed as part of the exhibition “Life Logistics”, the work had little beyond the title itself displayed—save for images of burning Amazon warehouses. It’s a simple piece with a clear message of resistance in the face of the corporate titan’s presence in the area via warehouses. In the leaked documents, it stated that the final decision to cut ties stemmed from Sanchez giving “an interview expressing hostility towards Amazon.”

The Riverside Art Museum and The Cheech have held strong in their support of the artist, museum director Drew Oberjuerge stating “We believe in supporting artists and curators who challenge, surprise, delight, annoy and anger. It’s through this dialogue we better understand our shared experience.” With Amazon’s ended donations being a drop in the bucket compared to the support they have, there is clearly no fiscal or ideological loss for the centre. They’re well-positioned to carry on with the intent of Marin’s words on the centre’s direction: “We have something wonderful to give.”

The identity of the infamously elusive Banksy, ever a hot topic in the art world, has been buzzing for the last while thanks to ongoing legal battles for the artist. This has unsurprisingly spurred an increase in speculation on the artist’s identity based on various threads of explanation and has resulted in some publications stating Banksy’s identity has finally been revealed. But how much weight do we give to the idea of “Robert Banks” as a real monicker?

Citing a recently unearthed interview from BBC, a conversation between Banksy and interviewer Nigel Wrench in which Wrench asks the artist if his name is “Robert Banks” and the artist responds “It’s Robbie,” multiple publications are now jumping on the idea that the name of the beloved graffiti artist has finally been discovered.

While there may be truth in the Rob part of the artist’s name (given both this evidence as well as the fact that two of the most stated possibilities for Banksy’s identity are Robert Del Naja and Robin Gunningham) it doesn’t seem all that likely that this mystery has come to its conclusion. Banksy has exhibited a history of meticulous planning around his work to maintain his anonymity, and even if it was earlier in his career with less of a scope of how influential he would become, it feels out of character to have such a slip-up in an interview.

But more pressingly…

Rob Banks? Really??

So far the claims of Banksy’s name being nailed down are nothing more than speculation. But given the ongoing legal battles he’s had and the sheer ramp-up of intrigue around unveiling the artist behind the works, it seems like only a matter of time before his identity, Robert Banks or otherwise, finally comes to light.

The ephemeral nature of graffiti and mural work is always in some state of jeopardy. The medium itself embodies a transience that of course is understood and expected by those involved in its creation. But more often than not, we expect a Banksy to persevere more or less indefinitely. With the recent destruction of an already targeted work commemorating and criticizing the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, it’s a reminder that even a legend’s works in this field are susceptible to erasure.

When the UK moved to leave the European Union in the late 2010s—the movement commonly known as “Brexit”—it sent a tumultuous ripple across the nation. With a wealth of artists staunchly opposing the idea as it marched through the proper channels across the years, this piece of Banksy’s work cropped up on a building in Dover in 2017.

The understated mural could easily be passed by without understanding any artistic endeavour is at work. Comprised largely of the bright blue and staunch series of stars that make up the EU’s flag, Banksy’s signature style is found in the bottom right corner—a worker atop a ladder chiselling away at one of the stars as it breaks away in pieces, descending downward. Simplistic in its depiction of a national schism, the unnamed painting drew widespread attention to the major port town amidst the political turmoil.

It was in 2019 that the mural first saw an attempted destruction with a complete whitewashing of the flag depicted. All that remained was the man on the ladder and a single, crude star before him with a rough depiction of the flag crumpled at the ground. While it could be seen as a typical Banksy stunt, the artist expressed his own surprise on Instagram at the time: “Oh. I had planned that on the day of Brexit I was going to change the piece in Dover to this. But seems they’ve painted over it. Nevermind. I guess a big white flag says it just as well.”

Now, after many a year and planning from the Dover City Council, the building and what remains of the work has come down. They state they were not part of the endeavour of whitewashing it, and had the demolition group slated for destroying the building for future developments save what they could of the original piece. But just as with the UK’s departure from the European Union, it seems far too late to get back the semblance of what was.