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August 7, 2012
Occupy Barclays Street Art
HYPERALLERGIC
by Ben Valentine
Bravo!
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Earlier this week I was anonymously given images of anti-Barclays street art spotted at the newly coined Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center subway stop in Brooklyn.
As the blurry images show, the work uses the Barclays name and funding of the station to highlight the recent LIBOR fixing scandal and the role of mega-corporations like Barclays in political turmoil throughout the world.
...Ben Valentine: Why do you risk arrest for this work?
Unnamed Occupier: There is seemingly no mechanism to actually hold too big to fail institutions accountable for their actions. The state sure as hell isn’t doing it. Banks don’t really care if you parade a giant puppet outside their building. They don’t care if you start an intentional community and get off the grid. But they notice when you fuck up their stuff. They notice things that make them look bad, or weak, or foolish (the Yes Men’s Bhopal apology is a really good example of this).
This specific action is pretty low-level and still mostly symbolic, but we’re doing things that put us at risk because they make these institutions understand that they are at risk, and they are going to be held accountable, if not by the state then through other means. Part of our goal is to highlight the divergence between the amount of real risk that we realistically face by performing this small act of civil disobedience, and the nearly nonexistant risk faced by the institutions perpetrating these massive crimes.
Click through for a couple more photos and the rest of the interview.
Posted by eric at August 7, 2012 11:12 AM