The Shoe Shiner

During his ’Better Out Than In’ show in New York, Banksy installed a life-size Ronald McDonald in the Bronx with a real kid underneath it, polishing the clown’s already-spotless shoes. The image hits you the wrong way—the corporate icon pristine and grinning, the child bent at work, grimy and somehow permanent-looking.

You don’t need an art degree to get what he’s doing. Kid shines shoes of famous corporate clown. That’s the whole thing, and the whole thing is enough. The discomfort is the point, and it works because he doesn’t give you anywhere to hide from it. A child doing labor that shouldn’t exist in a rich country, serving a plastic icon of consumption. The contrast is so direct it almost feels cheap, but it isn’t. That directness is the only way to actually make people look.

I don’t know if the kid was an actor or a street kid, if Banksy paid him, how long it went on. He never explains. You see the image and you sit with it, and what you do with that feeling is your problem. Some people see a comment on capitalism. Some people just see a dirty kid and move on. Banksy probably thinks you’re a coward if you choose the second one, but he’s not going to tell you that either.

That’s what I’ve always liked about him—the work stands and he walks away. No interviews explaining the concept, no artist’s statement, no TED talk about the meaning of shoes. Just the image, and you have to figure out what it means to you. It’s the opposite of everything in the art world, where every piece needs context and theory to justify itself. This doesn’t need anything but your eyes.

The statue’s probably gone now, torn down or painted over or disappeared into whatever happens to street art in gentrifying neighborhoods. But the photograph exists, and the memory of it exists, and somewhere a kid once shined a plastic clown’s shoe while the world took pictures. That’s the real work—not the installation, but what stays with you after.