The Spider House tells us a story
ONE of the most powerful aspects of the work of Bristol's legendary street artist Banksy is the way it challenges perceptions and stereotypes. It is one reason more than 300,000 people queued for up to four hours in his home town - they wanted to have their attitudes and beliefs challenged.
ONE of the most powerful aspects of the work of Bristol's legendary street artist Banksy is the way it challenges perceptions and stereotypes. It is one reason more than 300,000 people queued for up to four hours in his home town - they wanted to have their attitudes and beliefs challenged.
And for anyone confronted by some of Banksy's more provocative material, it is powerful stuff.
Art can have impact and move minds.
It certainly, in the case of young local artist Fab Martin, got one of Guernsey's more establishment estate and letting agents jumping.
From having given her permission to set up a piece of street art in a corner of the Commercial Arcade, Martel Maides was swiftly rescinding and insisting that she pull it down. The reason? More eloquently even than 350 words and a photograph in this newspaper could, her giant spider's web highlighted the unacceptable face of dereliction in St Peter Port.
More than that, it threw a spotlight on a decaying, but charming, 1830s shop that had become all but invisible to the rest us us because it has been neglected so long and simply ceased to be.
Yet these 'voids', as property experts term them, are an increasing problem in the commercial heart of Town.
While Fab's Spider House may not be a case in point, empty properties are calling into question the role of so-called greedy landlords and those who advise them on what rents to set.
In the case of a well known nightclub and popular Pollet bar there is another issue, as we report today, of whether landlords are truly supportive of their tenants or whether profit is their only motive. How quickly new occupants move into the club and bar might go some way towards answering that.
While property is money in Guernsey, as with the role of bankers and their lending policies, its control and use has to be ethically and morally acceptable to the community at large.
Some of the residential and commercial rents currently charged might suggest that a boundary has been crossed - and question the role of government as ultimate regulator.
Which just goes to show what a web of elastic can do in the Fab hands of a young local guerrilla artist.
