Okay, so I was recently at the Art of Banksy exhibition in Brisbane and one particular piece, located right at the end of the exhibition's main path, stood out to me. Take a look:28
It's weird, right? The car just doesn't seem to sit right in the piece, as if it was simply pasted in; the angle it sits on the ground is subtly wrong. You can see some other modified oil paintings in the same series by Banksy here, and they look far more sophisticated, with the additions painted into the scenes and matching them in lighting.
...and then another member of my party pointed out a far larger problem: the car depicted in the artwork is clearly a Tesla Model X, a 2015 car first unveiled in 2012, which Banksy surely could not have painted in 2005! And it seems unlikely this is merely a case of the wrong date being printed on the placard;29 the artwork matches the other works in Banksy's 2005 Crude Oils exhibition in style, so it's clearly meant to be part of that set. And I don't think he went back and did a cheeky extra one with a Tesla, because no reliable source I can find mentions a Banksy artwork titled "Countryside Ride".
In fact the only mention I can find is this reddit thread questioning whether the piece is actually by AI. I will at least say that it is not; the artwork the car is edited into is The Mountain Ford, 1846, by American artist Thomas Cole (though admittedly, a heavily crunched-out version of it),30 and the car image appears to be... uh... this one, which was the fifth result in Google images for Tesla Model X for me. Well, the image of the car clearly has some sort of "painterly style" filter applied, but...
With a bit of warping to account for the angle of my photo it's a pretty good match. Oh, the placards at the exhibition were totally AI though. Lots of vapid, surface-level analysis that is especially eager to puff up the importance of its subject matter. A couple of them had odd hallucinations, too. The didactic text they have for Banksy's Crude Oil (Vettriano), which depicts ballroom dancers on the beach with workers in hazmat suits cleaning up an oil spill behind them, says:
In Banksy’s version, the elegance and glamour of Vettriano’s ballroom dancers on the beach are undercut by a pair of uniformed hooligans holding their drinks, leering and intruding on the refined scene.
Yeah, I... what? Uniformed hooligans? The whole thing is weird to me. It's not like the exhibition was a total rush job - sure, it was a bit slapdash in parts,31 but you can't throw together something like this in an afternoon. Why would nobody double check that these placards were, at minimum, correctly describing the artworks? And back to that car... why forge a painting that doesn't exist? Most of the works in the exhibition were prints, reproductions - why go to the (albeit minimal) effort of making an entirely fake painting rather than just printing off something else? Did they just run out of usable scans and need something to fill space?
I might want to risk a guess here that the curator of this exhibition is trying to make his own point somehow. From an ABC piece about the exhibition:
Of the 150 works on display, 34 are certified originals — the private collection of Mr Gurkaynak [the curator of the exhibition] and his partner. It can be hard to tell if you are viewing a reproduction or not. For Mr Gurkaynak, authenticity is beside the point — real or replica, each work's ability to provoke thought is what matters.
Perhaps including a fake piece is the curator's way of making a little joke about people's inclination to believe art is genuine just because it shows up in a gallery.32 It is also very interesting that this piece features a Tesla, perhaps the most politically charged of all vehicles. As to what point it's trying to make, though, I do not feel qualified to speculate.
Muse Entertainment and Fever (the producer and promoter of the event respectively) did not respond to requests for comment. This post was originally written , but held back to give time for a response.
