If Mayor Bloomberg didn’t already dislike Banksy, this would definitely do it: On Sunday, the famous street artist revealed that he wanted his latest piece to be a New York Times op-ed, but the paper declined to publish it. Instead, he posted the article on his Better Out Than In website, and it’s easy to see why his thoughts on One World Trade Center gave the editors pause. “That building is a disaster,” he writes. “Well no, disasters are interesting. One World Trade centre is a non-event. It’s vanilla. It looks like something they would build in Canada.”
If his architecture critique stuck to Canada-bashing, the Times might have been willing to risk receiving a handful of angry letters, but the piece also contains the line, “It would be easy to view One World Trade Centre as a betrayal of everyone who lost their lives on September 11th, because it so clearly proclaims the terrorists won.”
The Times confirmed that Banksy submitted something resembling what appeared on his website. “We couldn’t agree on either the piece or the art, so we did reject it,” spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told the Post. “What he has posted on his site is not exactly the same as what he submitted.”
Here’s Banksy’s Times mock-up in full:
