Flipping the order of simulacra: from the Spirit of Terrorism to Street Art in the age of deglobalization
by Dr. Nello Barile 

1. Baudrillard in the age of deglobalization

The war against Ukraine has revealed a new phase in world history: we are moving from globalization to glocalization to deglobalization. While the first phase represented the peak of Western superpower and the second showed the need for a compromise between the sphere of globalism and the sphere of localism, with deglobalization we are facing a split of the global empire into at least two parts: the Atlantic side against the Eastern side with a possible support from the so-called global South. The end of the 1990s coincides with the decline of a euphoric vision that attributed to communication technologies the power to transform global society, open its borders and increase the degree of interdependence and interdependence between its parts. The story that follows with the beginning of the new millennium consists of a succession of global crises which began with September 11, developed into a migration emergency via the credit crisis and BREXIT, dramatically intensified with the pandemic and culminated with the invasion of Ukraine. The sequence of dramatic implosions leads to the current debate on deglobalization (Barile 2022, D’Eramo 2022), which requires us to rethink the world in a multipolar way, but also more specifically to reconsider the relationship between technology, counterculture and the myth of the global village.

Baudrillard already described the beginning of deglobalization in his popular pamphlet on the Spirt of terrorism (2002), published after the 9/11 which is at the same time in continuity and discontinuity with the previous reflection. In continuity because the the viralization of terrorism confirms the end of the dialectic, already discussed in other books (Baudrillard 1983). In discontinuity because in that long article, Baudrillard criticizes his previous conception of simulacra and its connection to globalization. Like Plato in the late phase of his life decided to self-criticize the architecture of his system, also Baudrillard developed a self-criticism about his most representative concept, made popular during the previous decades. A few years after the collapse of Soviet Union, Baudrillard reflected on the New Global Order, moving a radical criticism against the scholars who celebrated with enthusiasm the new phase. Already in the Illusion of the end (1994), the French philosopher moved against globalist thinker such as Fukuyama (1992), declaring that there there will not be the end, and all the future historical processes will develop slowly, in a sort of paradoxical reaction to the acceleration of global societies.  

Acceleration of modernity, of technology, events, and media, of all exchanges — economic, political and sexual — has propelled us to ‘escape velocity,’ with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and history (…). Deep down, one cannot even speak of the end of history here since history will not have time to catch up with its own end. Its effects are accelerating, but its meaning is slowing inexorably (…)” (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 1, 4).

Globalization used to be considered as the peak of a dialectical historical development. Giddens, for example, suggests an optimist definition which easily resolve any contrast between the sphere of local contexts and the one of global forces. 

Globalization can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa. This is a dialectical process because such local happenings may move in an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape them (Giddens 2000, p. 61).

His definition of globalization is already a reflection on glocalization, integrating in a positive way the level of local interactions with the one of global interests. In a very different way other thinkers, describe the separation and possible clash between those two levels. As in Barber’s idea of “Mcdonaldizations” (1995), where is clear the frontal clash between the role of the global, played by a huge infotainment global machine, and the role of the local named as jihad and referred to any kind of resistance against the expansion of the global empire. This idea is very insightful because it combines the ephemeral productions of the cultural industry (McDonald’s, MTV, Digital corporations etc.), with the geopolitical power of global countries. With the end of the Nineties, reflections on globalization intersects the one of Postmodernism: the logic of simulacra embraces the geopolitical superpower. In that moment “Baudrillard saw globalization and technological development producing standardization and virtualization that was erasing individuality, social struggle, critique and reality itself as more and more people became absorbed in the hyper and virtual realities of media and cyberspace and virtual culture (Kellner 2024, p. 11). In a similar way, the beginning of new millennium is characterized by a critical reflection which inspires many collective antiglobalization movements. The notion of Empire (Negri&Hardt 2001), reveals at the same time the sacred alliance between corporations and national or supranational powers, on the other side the capability of integrating local spheres under the all-encompassing logic of capital. 

After 9/11, Baudrillard brief reflection on the Spirit of Terrorism, enlightened the dark side of glocalization, against the optimist rhetoric of the previous decade. For this reason he said about September 11th that basically “we all dreamed of it a bit”, not so much in the sense that we desired it but to say that that possibility which nestled in various ways in the global imagination, fueled by the cultural industry, among other things. Think of the long series of disaster films of the Seventies, or more recently to the ending scene of Fight Club, in which the towers collapse to the sound of Where is my Mind by the Pixies. It is not a case that his first reflection of the Twin Towers was developed in a book of the Seventies, which is also the decade when catastrophic movies becomes popular. 

Scene from the film “Fight Club” (1999) 

Why has the World Trade Center in New York got two towers? All Manhattan’s great buildings are always content to confront each other in a competitive verticality (…) a pyramidal jungle, every building on the offensive against every other (…). The buildings are no longer obelisks, but trustingly stand next to one another like the columns of a statistical graph. This new architecture (…) embodies(…) the end of all competition, the end of every original reference (…). The two towers of the WTC are the visible sign of the closure of a system in the vertigo of doubling (…) the two towers reflect one another and reach their highest point in the prestige of similitude (Baudrillard 1976, p. 91).

With the construction of the WTC capitalism moves from the regime of production to the one of simulation. Until the competition between the other towers was more individual, we were still in a modern society where both reality and history have a strong meaning. With the creation of a perfect semiotic device such as the WTC, where each tower mirro itself in the other, the referential meaning of reality disappear in favor of the logic of code, of models, of simulation. The WTC is the celebration of a new era based on globalization, financialization and postmodernization of our societies. It is not a case that in the same book, Baudrillard also announces his first periodization of the history of simulacra based on three main orders: 

– The counterfeit is the dominant schema in the ‘classical’ period, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution;

– Production is the dominant schema in the industrial era.

– Simulation is the dominant schema in the current code-governed phase (ivi, p. 50).

The implosion of the twin towers simultaneously represents the culmination of virtualization, celebrating the aesthetics of past decades, and the intrusion of history into the heart of simulation. On the one hand, it celebrates the triumph of iconic images capable of displacing all possible news of the time according to the news values of agenda-setting, especially the one defined “amplitude” (Hodkinson 2017, p. 163). On the other hand, the catastrophe interrupts the “event strike” and shows how history strikes back with its violent potential against the narcotic logic of simulacra. If the event can be considered more spectacular than the spectacle, it is only because it has absorbed the viral power of images, in a kind of competition between reality and images as to who can be more unimaginable. The real has thus broken into the heart of the show, challenged it on its own terrain and absorbed its excessive, violent, hypnotic and explosive character. The unspeakable 9/11 has called the world back to reality, as the story that lay dormant in the 80s through the profusion of media has awakened and reimagined itself with unusual violence. This is the end of all your virtual stories — that is real!” Similarly, one could perceive a resurrection of history after its proclaimed death. But does reality really prevail over fiction? If it seems so, it is because reality has absorbed the energy of fiction, and become fiction itself. One could almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of the image (…). It is as if they duel, to find which is the most unimaginable. The collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center is unimaginable, but that is not enough to make it a real event (…). Real and fiction are inextricable, and the fascination of the attack is foremost the fascination by the image (…) (Baudrillard 2002, p. 28).

If it is true that “reality has massively moved into the screen to cancel its identity within it” (ibidem), at the same time the logic of entertainment, image and marketing have penetrated the most hidden layers of society. The symbolic power of the simulacrum, which should have purged every trace of singularity from reality, has instead given rise to an obsessive search for uniqueness, history, reality. The 1990s certainly contributed to this process, in their revaluation of the authentic, the informal, the local, the tactical, etc. But all this underwent a drastic reversal when it was understood that that centripetal movement of globalization was arrested by a tragical series of global crisis. This revenge of history cannot be translated into a return to modern-style ascending linearity, but into something more violent and at the same time chaotic.

2. The ecstasy of terror

Jean Baurdillard was one of the first to boldly use the concept of ecstasy to define an almost unnameable phenomenon like terrorism. Even if what the philosopher-sociologist was addressing was a relatively different typology – the BR, the RAF – with respect to which he will have to adjust his aim after September 11th. Since the 1980s, Baudrillard conceived terrorism as an “ecstatic form of violence” (Baudrillard 1983, p. 41): an overbearing sign of the transparency of evil, also capable of revealing the crisis of a system that had been thought of as opposed to “evil” in a zero-sum game, but which finds itself inextricably linked to it. The main mistake of Western philosophy, that of the Enlightenment, believes that the progress of Good, its growth in power in all areas (science, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. But “Good and Evil” grow in power at the same time and according to the same movement. The triumph of one does not entail the annihilation of the other, on the contrary. 

Good and Evil are irreducible to each other and their relationship is inextricable… Therefore no supremacy of one over the other. This balancing is broken starting from the moment in which there is total extrapolation of the Good (Baudrillard 2001 , pp. 18, 20).

The obsession of Western culture with the triumph of good, which translates into the hegemony of the positive, or the expulsion from the system of any negative event such as aging, illness, impotence, death, is just a virtual representation. The term “ecstasy” expresses the eugenic canceling of evil into an extreme experience which remove the traumatic presence of reality. Brought back into the context of religious discourse, the term ecstasy suggests a need to escape from everyday reality and to lose it in a higher dimension that allows us to reconquer a sort of authenticity precluded or limited by modern devices. Furthermore, the same term, in its psychotropic variant, suggests the same escape but emptied of the religious component and totally induced by the chemical alteration of the senses. An extreme, unusual experience, capable of overturning the ordinary and reconciling the subject we abandon ourselves with its own supposed essence or authenticity. In this regard, however, the anthropologist of religions could object that this idea of ​​”ecstasy” is too vague and underline, for example, the difference with another concept, that of trance, which represents a sort of collective and dynamic variant of the “ecstatic” condition. 

Gilbert Rouget (1980), for example, insists on this dichotomy and ascribes opposite values to the two terms. If we are to accept the dichotomy proposed by Rouget, perhaps to apply it inappropriately to the terrorist phenomenon, we would have to conclude that contemporary terrorism has more to do with the dimension of trance than that of ecstasy. It represents a clearly planned tragic ritual (i.e. without “visions”) which implies movement, noise, the presence of other people, the attempt to resolve an identity crisis, the effect of sensory overload, but which in turn reverberates everywhere and spreads the terrible images of the attacks, at the end of which there is a kind of individual and collective elimination. However, in addition to the famous ethnomusicologist’s reflections, other scholars have tried to smooth out the differences between the pairs listed above and reinforce the points of contact between the two categories. Thus we speak of “ecstatic trance” (Lapassade 1990) as a synthesis of psychological and ritual state based on the dissociation of the subject in a kind of visionary journey or ritualized hallucination which is not an exit from the body, but a merging of the body with the cosmos. Baudrillard also uses the term “ecstasy” to refer essentially to a medial process in which the subject, exposed to the multiplication of communication streams, loses its own identity reference points and approaches a dimension characteristic of the schizophrenic. In some way the ecstasy of terror is the response to the ecstasy of communication. Even ISIS, as Al Qaeda after the 9/11, has brought many elements of contemporary media culture into its own “brand”. 

Considering that Islamist terrorism represents one of the forces that oppose the key values ​​of the Western system, it is certainly useful to understand the reason why the West, but even more so Europe and especially France, have become the targets privileged of this murderous fury which is at the same time an iconoclastic fury. What happened in Paris in the sad January of 2015 represents the point of no return of a new terrorism which not only arrives in Europe, as Al Qaeda had already done in London and Madrid, but which does so with a primarily symbolic purpose: to impact on the collective imagination, which turn on warning lights, which arouse powerful responses but also boundless and atavistic fears. Freedom of expression is one of them. Together with other central values ​​in the Western vulgate, it constitutes the axiological nucleus on which the France-Europe-West system is built. Other connections contributed to amplifying the symbolic value of the operation, again starting from toponymy. For example, the proximity of the tragic event on Rue Voltaire. The philosopher who best represents the innovation of values ​​introduced by the Enlightenment, against the chains of tradition, but also the one who in his Candide was able to prefigure some paradoxical aspects of globalization. Of course, this is not to argue that the attack was planned by careful connoisseurs of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but this is certainly enough to understand how each attack is packaged as a polysemous product or text. It is modular like the brand from which it originates (in this case ISIS) and conveys a precise message with a certain nuance of meaning to each segment of the public. The average Western man interprets the gesture as an irrational or at least unjustified explosion of violence that ensnares him, making it impossible for him to understand what is happening, except by drawing on the modest pool of opinions made available by the media system. The attack is full of symbolic references and touches crucial issues that concern the development of Western modernity.

Extreme critical events such as terrorism prove the crisis of dialectics and therefore also of a certain linear idea of ​​history. Dialectics, understood as a development that passes through contradiction and reaches a superior synthesis, is replaced by the much more postmodern idea of ​​elevation to the “power X”. With this operation the force of the negative, or the contradiction that drives the story, is resolved in the cancellation of the negativity on the level of simulation. The negative multiplied by itself loses its content of contradiction, of friction which allows the story to move to a higher level, and remains almost sublimated into a powerful image which however loses all referentiality. The exaltation to the power transform history. In the new combinatorial regime of simulation, “things lose their finality” and their “critical determination” and reproduce themselves unlimitedly thanks to the electronic means of communication, but even more so through today’s digital ones. The philosopher’s quip in 1991 at the outbreak of the war in Iraq was famous, during which he said that the war in the Gulf never existed. Baudrillard was obviously referring to the fact that the new media regime, then in the process of globaliziation, offered an hyper-realistic representation of the war which therefore existed but was not there in the way it was represented. CNN quickly became famous on a global scale precisely because it obtained the contract to narrate the conflict which, between fake tanks deployed by Saddam and infrared footage of the missile attacks on the skies of Baghdad, offered viewers a highly watered down, partial and ideologically distorted image of the conflict. We moved from the modern idea of war, where soldiers were still protagonists, to the postmodern idea of war (Baudrillard 1995), which is still very visible after the 7/10, when hostages again became protagonists of the conflict, while their identities are dramatized through traditional and digital media.

“CNN journalists look back on the Gulf War” (2016)

3.  Flipping consumption imagery against western values

The relationship between history and the theory of the simulacrum is therefore fundamental, with particular reference to the resurgence of historical violence in the period from the first Gulf War, up to the explosion of jihadist violence. If initially, and until the 1990s, the project of the simulacrum operated as a function of emptying reality, purged of any trace of singularity, with the advent of the new millennium the power of the simulacrum and the virtualization processes connected to it succumbed to in the face of an event as catastrophic as it is spectacular. With September 11th, reality broke into the heart of entertainment, challenging it on its own terrain, absorbing its excessive, violent and explosive character. If the 1991 offered a virtual representation of war, more recent wars represented conflicts in a different way. The brutal images of torture and massacres, offered daily by satellite broadcasts and subsequently by the web, have upset world public opinion with their brutality, which has surpassed the contents of the most extreme artistic performances in terms of symbolic power. All this has brought back to the public an archaic and ritual violence, which had been removed from the phenomenology of our daily lives and had now become unbearable for our comfortable gazes.

Upon closer inspection, there are evident differences in the tactics adopted but Al Qaeda and ISIS. Since Al Qaeda is more inclined to more complex, carefully planned actions, with an almost epochal impact on public opinion and the sense of history, while the ISIS brand is more modular, it operates on multiple levels, including the even more frightening one of a DIY terrorism, or rather of death in everyday life. Compared to this, the issue of suicide terrorism also takes on another meaning. In the case of Al Qaeda it is the symbolic one of sacrificing the martyrs in a sensational event almost sealed and crowned by the death of its executor. In this way, in addition to the fateful tactical cunning of using “the weapons of the system as a boomerang against the enemy, terrorists have a fatal weapon at their disposal: their own death” (Baudrillard 2001, p. 15).

A tactic which, returning to the discussion on nihilism, the growth of power and the use of technology «combines modern means with this highly symbolic weapon that infinitely multiplies their potential for destruction» (p. 16). A “sacrificial pact” that simply wants to communicate to its enemy, i.e. the West and above all the USA, that there is no possibility of victory against a progeny of fighters willing to use their lives against a power whose limit is myths of “zero death” and surgical warfare. For the new brand of terrorism, however, the suicidal gesture is less representative and is mostly used against enemies in the Middle East, such as the use of a twelve-year-old child for a massacre in a Kurdish wedding. It other cases it is the collateral effect, the stakes to be paid for the attack to succeed in the best possible way. In other collateral effect of the attack is the dilatation of time which feed media storytelling. The life cycle of the attack is lengthen, prolonging its impact on the media and on public opinion, in an expectation that becomes increasingly neurotic. As it happened during the escapes of terrorist to Belgium after the Paris attacks. The unexpectedness of the terrorist attack, created to strike with great intensity within a short time, had changed to keep global public opinion in tension.

To many, September 11th seemed like a decisive step capable of sinking postmodern aesthetics to reawaken history numbed by the power of the image, thus inaugurating a new era shaken by economic transformations and geopolitical tensions. Al Qaeda’s communication gimmicks were in fact in line with this idea of ​​a crisis of postmodernity. Although there was much that was postmodern in the return to ritual and archaic violence that mimicked elements and practices of tradition (Maffesoli 2007). At the time, the leap in quality in terms of communication which, thanks to the new terrorist groups, would have proposed an even more sophisticated, post-produced and spectacular image of the war against the West was not even imaginable. This is perhaps a sign of discontinuity between the Al Qaeda brand and that of ISIS. We return to a simulacral construction in which production houses, graphic and visual designers, extras or performers of something which however is not fictitious (unless one wants to accept some conspiracy theory) but terribly real operate.

If in the case of old terrorism reality is sublimated through the raising of the negative, in the second case of 11 September the negative is welcomed into the spectacle and with it enters into competition with those who are more extreme and unimaginable, in the third case the new brand of terror operates in cross-media mode, in the sense that it sets the type of communication with respect to the specific characteristics of the medium and the audience, or transmedia in the sense that it produces a storytelling capable of involving a varied audience which becomes a tool for completing the message (on social media) and to relaunch/amplify it on a broader level through social and grassroot media. In this substantial co-presence of a high spectacularization of the image and an increasingly immature and primitive violence lies perhaps the key to current Islamist terrorism. The ecstasy of the violence produced by terror corresponds to the anesthesia of the spectator who, educated by the old media on the proliferation of catastrophic images, now finds himself reproducing them in a surprising and unlimited variety. Indeed, he is now the main source of this production which triggers anesthetic spirals. 

Terrorism has absorbed and metabolised the logic of consumption and branding within its organizational and communication practices. If it is true that now everything is consumption, since consumption is experience, the terrorist act adheres to the same experiential logic that exalts authenticity as a fundamental value. The search for authenticity could also be a variable that explains the radicalization of terrorists, which follows a cultural and cognitive dynamic similar to the increasingly irrational practice of extreme sports: from base jumping to the wingsuits. Of course, this comparison may seem excessive and even disrespectful towards the victims. But there are some deep and hidden connections between the practice of leisure and a practice of death. In extreme sports there is an extreme experiential dimension that claims the right to be experienced, and also a technical equipment which is indispensable to perform in a better way and also to communicate the performance through social media. The horrifying attack of the 7 October, organized by Hamas against a group of young Israeli ravers, shows how postcolonial logic can turn Hollywood horror imagery into a tangible reality. The attack is a perfect example of the way in which a technical equipment inspired by extreme sports, is flipped into an human hunting against a young crowd of dancers. The use of hang glider, paragliding and GoPro cameras to surprise the victims with are killed or kidnapped on sportive Jeeps, shows the conjunction between western lifestyles and a sort of archaic and ritualized collective slaughter. Moreover, the attack is an explicit reference to the Bataclan attack, and some other attacks against music clubs such as Reina in Istanbul, Pulse in Orlando, and more recently the unexpected attack in Moscow. In the archetypal case of the Bataclan, the shock was determined by the fact that the intended victims were a very specific niche: left-wing young listener of indie music who went to have fun listening the American band called Eagles of Death Metal. The attack on the Reina club in Istanbul was aimed at a local and international crowd which included tourists from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, from India, Tunisia etc. Also in this case the reference to Hollywood imagery is confirmed by the fact that the killer was disguised as Santa Claus, almost mimicking the iconic figure of Dan Akroyd in Trading Places directed by John Landis. In the Orlando case, the target of the attack was the Pulse, an hip hop nightclub in the city and frequented mainly by a homosexual audience. In the time that has passed between the execution of the attack and the civic protest of the local gay community, the twisted psychology of the attacker has become clear. The terrorist was considered as a lone wolf: a problematic individual and, according to the press, self-radicalized through the web, although at the same time the figure of his father, an active member of the Afghan Islamic community with radical political positions, seems very significant. An aspect made even more problematic by the father’s statement, when he told NBC News that a few months earlier, “his son would have become angry after seeing two men kissing in Miami”. For many newspapers, the sense of guilt for his unacceptable latent homosexuality would have been the spark that triggered the spiral of hatred that led to a serial murder which, in reality, if there had not been self-radicalization, would have been very similar to a typical product of American culture. For this reason, Obama himself attempted to confine the phenomenon to the domestic and psychiatric dimension (Ellis, Fantz, McLaughlin, Hume 14/6/2016), without wanting to involve the Islamic question. In reality, as the CNN journalists themselves underlined, the attacker “consumed a quantity of jihadist propaganda” (ibidem). In reality, other sources have ascertained various attempts to plan an attack, including an inspection in the company of his wife in Disneyland. The choice of the very famous American theme park is perfectly in line with the idea of ​​wanting to punish the Western lifestyle which passes through the glorification of consumption. Furthermore, in a perverse game of references between old and new terrorism and the collective imagination.

The recent attack in Moscow against Crocus City Hall, confirms the previous trend and reveales the panicking image of a world completely out of control. If at least the notion of deglobalziation opens to a new cold war which is not cold anymore because it hosts a huge tragedy in the heart of Europe, the attack in Moscow results even more chaotic and unpredictable than the other attacks. On a side the conspiracy theory which is immediately adopted to accuse terrorist of possible connections with Ukraine; on the other side the reality of a clashes between powers which triggers chaotic and unpredictable violence. The use of deepfake to support conspiracy theories is again the way in which the logic od simulacra, amplified by generative AI, competes with reality to create even more unthinkable paroxistic events: too fast, too systematic, too extreme, too paradoxical to be true. 

4. The state of countercultures in the age of deglobalization: Banksy versus Jorit 

Art is another battleground of the actual clash between different  spheres of deglobalization. For this reason Street Art becomes even more strategical because more attached to the reality of urban contexts and cultures, with interventions into public spaces, where it can be seen by all. Street art continues the avant-garde proposal to overwhelm the separation between art and everyday life, For this reason artwork is incorporated into the urban environment or the street itself acts as a canvas. Social media, and Instagram in particular, is a powerful medium for global dissemination. In today’s globalized world of street art, artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey use their works to address pressing global issues such as inequality, war and environmental degradation. They capitalize on the interdependence of our global community and inspire global activism and thinking. Banksy’s political activism, also known as “artivism”, is emblematic of the current state of countercultures. He creates subversive works to combat political hypocrisy, particularly in relation to broader issues such as capitalism and consumerism. Again, removed from the mainstream by definition, he has become one of the most powerful brands in the contemporary art world. Banksy refuses to sell his artworks to galleries or museums because he believes they should be accessible to the public. For this reason, he carefully chooses the venues where he exhibits his work to reinforce the narrative of the work. Unlike mainstream art culture, which places more emphasis on celebrities, his decision to remain anonymous allows the focus to be on his art and its message rather than his identity.

Disneyland has already been the scene of an incursion by Banksy in 2006, when the famous street artist installed a hooded mannequin dressed in the iconic orange jumpsuit of the terrorist of Guantanamo prisoners (as told in the 2010 documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop, directed by Banksy himself and Shepard Faire). Banksy’s installation inside Disneyland represents the irruption of reality into the circuit of simulation. The image of a Guantanamo prisoner produces a powerful uncanny effect for families and kids visiting the park. Who is that figure? What kind of superhero it represents? So different from the rest of zoomorphic creatures peopling Disney’s imagery. According to Baudrillard (1983), Disney is there to prove that there is a real country outside the simulation, while there is not. Since the irruption of reality shows also that we are all prisoners of a regime of signs which turns simulation into a totalitarian experience. The creation of Dismaland, a dystopian version of a Disney theme park, confirms his situationist approach against the spectacle which push us to reflect on a postspectacular society. 

People look on at Banksy’s artwork in Disneyland (2012)

Banksy’s work goes beyond the impact of conventional street art and continues to stimulate and influence discussions in society, media and politics. His support to the Palestinian cause is consolidated in time and not the temporary expression of an emotional climate. In Bansky the “authentic” spirit of counterculture survives even in contemporary times, when become more difficult to define what is right or wrong. In several works and public art initiatives, he supported Palestine, as recently he did  the same with Ukraine. The mythical image of David and Goliath is compared to two judo fighter where the bigger and older one is beaten by the smaller and younger. 

Mural by Banksy in Borodyanka, Ukraine (2022) 

More recently another Street Artist became popular as the “Italian Banksy”, even if his art is very far from the English artist. Jorit portrays his characters as heroes involved in a tough fight,  usually represented with a peculiar signature on their face, reminding the Indian facial paintings. The list of celebrities peopling his Pantheon is quite long: from Maradona to Pasolini, from Mandela to Che Guevara. Jorit is the expression of a more commercial, authorized and generalized form of street art. On the wave of a certain radical leftwing, inspired by the Nineties, he embraced a third worldism doctrine to legitimize new emerging powers of deglobalization. Very differently from the Banksy’s Judo fighters, Jorit  made murales celebrating pro-russian fighters in Donbass. While more recently, he “spontaneously” invited Putin to take a picture together, to prove that he is not a monster. That video, spread through social media, became the sign an explicit positioning of his work against pro-ukranian parties and more generally against Western power. 

Banksy’s tactical irruption of the ugliest reality in the heart of a spectacle, summarizes Baudrillard’s reflection from Disneyland to the 9/11. This interruption of the fictional daydreaming forces people to reflect on a reality which is commonly accepted. It could be the one of Guantanamo prisoners, the one of the death of democracy, the one of emerging powers trying to exploit the same logic of simulacra used by western superpowers and spreading it through legacy media, pranks or deep fakes. Banksy’s neo-situationist approach which flip simulacra from signs of power into signs of shame, is one of the most cogent implementations of Baudrillard’s thought in the age of deglobalization.  

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