Artist specialized in paintings of Chase bank on fire

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/29/artist-specialized-in-painting.html

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How a nominally decent person can put on a police uniform nowadays and not be utterly disgusted by the lack of integrity, honor and sanity it represents is astonishing!

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I admire obsessive people. Good on you, banks-on-fire painter.

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LOL This definitely wins The Internet for today. Oh my god! LOLOL

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The decent people quit some time in the distant past.

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As soon as I saw this I knew the police would be investigating him. :frowning:️

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Are they worried about some sort of voodoo influence? Did it work? Does reproducing the images in BoingBoing amplify the effect?

I think the public should be given the facts.

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Freedom of speech does not imply freedom to impugn corporations!

And snark aside, those are amazing paintings, even if they do upset the police.

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I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.

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I remember the Isla Vista Bank of America burning.

Sometimes dreams do come true.

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What a great protest. Someone has got to paint pics of Trump in handcuffs at his rallies.

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Did he draw them on the bank? Because otherwise it doesn’t even begin to make sense. Not that any of the reactions to his paintings make that much sense…

I suspect just doing a painting of the bank without the flames would be enough to get him investigated. People are weirdly hostile to art because it confuses them. To quote one security guard, 'I don’t know what you’re doing - but stop it!"

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I’d settle for a painting depicting Trump as the Human Torch.

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I like the line of thinking this artist represents. Maybe he could branch out to, say, Citibank, Bank of America, and of course, Wells Fargo.

Hmmm, Goldman Sachs could just be a squid exploding.

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I’m from Chicago. There’s very little shock value for me in a rendering of a single building on fire.

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Sort of like Thomas Kinkade, but with Chase banks rather than burning cottages?

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I remember following this with intense interest. He had at least a few supporters, because he sold one on ebay for thousands.

The part I thought was most interesting was when they tried to impose the “no photography” rule when he was painting, wasn’t inside, and was not even close to the property.

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What’s more, the guy paints well. He’s the Edward Hopper of Too Big to Fail.

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I suspect a painting of the bank without flames would get him investigated as well, but I don’t think people are hostile to art because it confuses them. Rather it’s not normal to see someone painting a bank. If you see that happening, you come up with a story for why. If your job is stopping criminals, the story you might come up with is “That guy is casing this bank, because he wants to rob it.” Admittedly, if you’re moderately intelligent your next thought would be “Wait, that’s stupid, he must just be some sort of artist.”

Saying people are hostile to art because it confuses them kinda gives the impression of the people being too stupid to understand art, and I really dislike this. I think it leads to people disengaging from art, because they think it’s for the elite, and artists getting inflated egos. The former cuts people off from art, and the latter often produces bad art. Neither of those is good.

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It’s not free speech to yell “fire” in a bank. Painting a picture however, is perfectly fine.

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