The young people who toppled the statue of the Bristol slaver Colston, rolled it to the waterside and sent it to the bottom of the river, from a dockside that connects England to the Atlantic, have done a wonderful public service. It was not an act of disorder but one of restitution. It was not an act of the mob – no one was hurt, no property was damaged – it proved the wisdom of the crowd.
Every conceptual artist around the world groaned with envy. Days after Christo died, who wrapped buildings, parks and monuments in sheets, the Bristolians of Black Lives Matter have wrapped history itself in the images of their action. Ai Weiwei famously smashed a 2,000 year old Han pot to symbolise the destruction of his country’s past by China’s communists. Now centuries of slavery have been repudiated by plunging the likeness of one of its monstrous organisers into the waters. Waters that his slave ships sailed and into which they threw the corpses, and sometimes the living souls, of their cargo. Banksy, perhaps the country’s most famous living creator, whose brilliant renditions of injustice fight an art-market that seeks to monetise everything, has been gloriously upstaged in his very own home town.
For this delightful, emancipating and profoundly necessary action, the perpetrators will prove to be the artists of the future. Under the philistine regime of Brexit Britain, they will be hunted down and persecuted by those who masquerade as the UK’s elected representatives. The policing minister, Kit Malthouse declared, “Undoubtedly in what was done to that statue, a crime was committed. An investigation should be under way and I hope that prosecutions will follow. We can't have decisions by mob."
