Provenance
Private Collection, USA
Private Collection, United Kingdom
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Auction History
Phillips London: 14 October 2022
Estimated: GBP 1,200,000 – 1,800,000
GBP 1,837,500 / USD 2,059,975

Banksy – 20th Century & Contemporary… Lot 21 October 2022 | Phillips

 

Audacious and provocative, in Sorry The Lifestyle You Ordered Is Currently Out Of Stock guerrilla street artist Banksy collapses high culture and street art, applying the pointed satire of his site-specific graffiti to a direct critique of the connections between the art market, consumer capitalism, and environmental issues. Set within a heavy gilt frame evoking museum walls and Old Master paintings, the work is composed of an appropriated canvas featuring a romantic mountain landscape, defaced with the slogan ‘Sorry The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock’ and attached to a densely spraypainted board behind. Uniting these different elements within the work Banksy forges unexpected dialogues between them, communicating his message with characteristic economy and wit.

Asger Jorn, Hirschbrunft im Wilden Kaiser (Deer in Heat in the Wilder Kaiser), 1960,
Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Image: Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin, Artwork: © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / DACS, London 2022

In it’s a clever combination of humor, appropriation, and the pointed conflation of so-called high and low art forms, Sorry The Lifestyle You Ordered Is Currently Out Of Stock follows in the disruptive mode of Situationist artists such as Asger Jorn. Appropriating reproductions of well-known paintings and the canvases of amateur artists, Jorn applied thick, gestural marks and compositional additions, altering the meaning communicated by the original work in the process. Borrowing the vocabulary of advertising and consumerism to identify the hypocrisy involved in promoting a discourse of England as a ‘green and pleasant land’ while allowing profit-seeking enterprises to simultaneously dismantle that landscape, the work is a product of what Gianni Mercurio has described as Banksy’s mode of ‘brandalism’: ‘a rebellion against the great corporations that manage our lives, our forms of consumption, even the space in which we live, through choices that are exclusively aimed at making profit.’

First appearing in a large-scale stenciled work on the side of an empty building on the corner of East India Dock Road in London’s East End in 2011, the text ‘Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock’ playfully wraps political commentary in the familiar language of commodity consumption. Although simple, the interaction of the message with its location made a powerfully pointed statement about gentrification in the East End, and the wild property speculation that followed the closure of the docks in the early 1980s. Littered with estate agent boards, the abandoned building appears to have been a casualty of this aggressive growth, stalled when the 2008 financial crisis started to bite. Ironically invoking slogans associated with our own consumer experience, Banksy shifts our focus out to a more global level, using the familiar to open our eyes to global inequalities and existing power structures that operate in the background of our day to day lives. Having applied it in a critique of the economic forces and social inequalities played out in urban space, Banksy quickly adopted the slogan in a sharp critique of the art world, most pointedly in his 2013-14 collaboration with fellow Bristol-born artist Damien Hirst, defacing an immediately recognisable Spot Painting  with grey spray paint and overlaid with the same white text we see in the present work. While this work played very deliberately with Hirst’s reputation as representative of the market forces driving contemporary art to record prices, Sorry The Lifestyle You Ordered Is Currently Out Of Stock returned to an earlier conflation of art, the environment, and the ethics of late capitalism that Banksy first deployed in his infamous 2005 Crude Oils exhibition.

“The vandalised paintings reflect life as it is now. We don’t live in a world like Constable’s Haywain anymore and, if you do, there is probably a travellers’ camp on the other side of the hill. The real damage done to our environment is not done by graffiti writers and drunken teenagers, but by big business… exactly the people who put gold-framed pictures of landscapes on their walls and try to tell the rest of us how to behave.”

Littered with stenciled cctv cameras, rubbish, burnt-out cars, and military helicopters, the broader group of ‘vandalised paintings’ to which the present work belongs made their first appearance alongside some 200 live rats in a disused commercial space in London’s affluent Notting Hill in Banksy’s Crude Oils exhibition. In their own way, these works are highly representative of our contemporary landscape, Sorry The Lifestyle You Ordered Is Currently Out Of Stock in particular articulating something that might not be visible, but is keenly felt in a period of economic and socio-cultural upheaval. Evoking the language of high culture and advertising and exposing the ways in which both are exploited by the dominant hegemonic order as tools for exercising and maintaining power, Banksy attacks established value systems and exposes the hypocrisy and disingenuity that characterize the times we live in. Finding innovative ways to translate a graffiti sensibility onto canvas, the defaced oil paintings represent a significant moment in the development of Banksy’s practice, and of the scope of his institutional critique. In the words of the artist, ‘if you want to survive as a graffiti writer when you go indoors your only option is to carry on painting over things that don’t belong to you.’