Banksy’s dire new theme park is overflowing with stale clichés

So by now you’ve heard of Dismaland, Banky’s piss-taking new themepark. For the next five weeks it’ll be open in the seaside hell hole of Weston-super-mare. Before you all fall for the media hype and start booking your tickets, I offer my experience as a word of warning.

I attempted to get tickets last Friday. They were going to come online at an unspecified time, which meant checking the website ever hour on the hour, only to find the tickets still unavailable, or the website had crashed.

At midday the whole website vanished and Banksy was forced to offer a rather feeble and out of character apology on his website. Ticket sales were abandoned due to the website receiving six million views per minute.

What if I just wanted to have a nice time?

Much of the media speculated this was all part of the experience: we’d all been part of the art, rather than saying what it really was – an immense failure on the part of Banksy and his team.

Banksy is of course famous for creating art of the lowest common lefty denominator. Art for the person who’s wanted to free Palestine since summer 2k14, who loves Jezza Corbyn but only heard of him in June.

He seems to get most of his inspiration from the Daily Mail, and executes his vision with the sort of feigned anger and irony found in its online comment section. He is consistenly late on just about everything as well.

In Dismaland his new work critiques such cutting edge issues as: immigration (UKIP is bad, ok kids), and something involving ducks and the BP oil spill. The BT oil spill. How long ago was that again bro?

Please don’t smile – you’re on CCT

Inside Dismaland the rain meant most of the attractions had been abandoned: no mini-golf, Punch and Judy show or portrait artist. The Ferris Wheel didn’t work and the picnic areas were abandoned. Visitors had to navigate large areas of floodwater to get to different parts of the park.

The indoor galleries were also overcrowded due to the weather, with makeshift wet floor signs put up to avoid a slip, a fall and an inevitable lawsuit. Punk it wasn’t.

The whole concept of a sinister Disneyland rip-off is itself a rip-off. If we look to the work of one of the included artists – Jeff Gillette – we see that he painted a series of works called “Dismayland” in as far back as 2010. It seems Banksy thought it was ok to lazily drop the ‘y’ and include Gillette in the show, but the whole park stinks of unoriginality.

As for the other other artists involved, its almost guaranteed that 98 per cent of people visiting this show will not have heard of any of them, except maybe for Damien Hirst or, sorry, “the bloke who put a shark in a tank that one time.” Other than Hirst the list of Dismaland contributers reads as a list of assorted no marks, nobodies and non entities.

Banksy has fallen back on his common tactic of shunning global organisations and sticking one finger up at the authorities – consistent, overused tropes in the Bristolian’s canon. As I walked around the park, bored and miserable, I was struck by just how much I’d have rather been in sunny Florida, at the real Disneyland.

Inside the fire damaged Dismaland castle I looked at a huge overturned Cinderella carriage, the horses sprawled out in agony, the fair maiden herself lying limp over the doorframe and multiple paparazzi having dismounted their scooters all jostling for one horrific money shot. Yay, a Princess Diana joke – too soon? – maybe if you’d made it 15 years ago Mr. B.

Finally I felt it was time to leave and exit through the gift shop (not too hip to make money are we Banksy), where I managed to resist the overpriced t-shirts on sale and scarpered back into the rain, but not before a parting witticism from the doorman, “have an awful day” – thanks mate.

Tickets have since gone back on sale online, with the first two batches selling out in 20 minutes, and some being resold on ebay for hundreds of pounds, but don’t worry if you can’t go: you’d only be missing out on a shit day, in a shit town, in a shit theme park.

The point of art is in its difference from everyday reality. It inpires, it amuses, it amazes. Banksy is not an artist – he’s a craftsman – everything he makes is exactly the same. And like any craftsman who belives himself to be an artist, his work, with Dismaland the prime example, becomes a procession of boring, inspid and stale clichés.