AMATEUR WATERCOLOUR BY A FRIEND OF THE OWNER,2017

THE ARTWORK THAT ISN'T THERE

Created for The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem in 2017, Amateur Watercolour by a Friend of the Owner is among the most economical of Banksy's interventions within the hotel. Presented in an elaborate antique-style gilt frame, the work consists of an almost featureless pale field bearing only the stenciled inscription “AMATEUR WATERCOLOUR / BY A FRIEND OF THE OWNER.” The promised watercolor is conspicuously absent. Instead, its description has become the artwork.

The humour depends upon the conventions of display. The imposing frame prepares the viewer for a traditional painting of some significance, while the inscription resembles the dismissive description that might accompany an insignificant decorative picture. Banksy reverses those expectations: there is effectively nothing to look at except the institutional language telling us what we are supposedly looking at.

BY A FRIEND OF THE OWNER

The final phrase supplies the sharper joke. “By a friend of the owner” replaces artistic authorship with social proximity. The imaginary amateur has apparently earned a place on the wall not through artistic distinction but through knowing the person who controls the wall.

Within the Walled Off Hotel, the joke becomes particularly self-referential. Banksy was not merely exhibiting there: he had conceived and financed the entire project, designed rooms and interiors, and filled the building with his own paintings, sculptures and interventions. The anonymous artist who had spent years questioning the mechanisms by which galleries and museums determine cultural value had, temporarily, become the owner of the walls himself.

THE WALLED OFF HOTEL AS A TOTAL ARTWORK

Opened in Bethlehem in March 2017 immediately beside the West Bank Barrier, The Walled Off Hotel operated simultaneously as a functioning hotel, political installation, museum, gallery and extraordinary exercise in environmental storytelling. Its rooms and communal spaces were filled with works in which Banksy repeatedly appropriated the visual language of the traditional British hotel—ornate frames, landscape paintings, colonial furnishings and decorative objects—and corrupted it through references to surveillance, military occupation, territorial division and conflict. The project also contained a museum devoted to the history and politics surrounding the barrier, curated by Banksy's team with Dr Gavin Grindon.

Amateur Watercolour belongs to the quieter end of that project. Unlike the hotel's paintings of soldiers, watchtowers or damaged landscapes, it contains no explicit political imagery. Instead, Banksy turns his attention toward authorship, patronage and the authority conferred by presentation itself.

The result is almost conceptual in its simplicity. Remove the frame and the institutional setting and remarkably little remains. Put the same sentence inside an ornate gold frame, however, and the viewer instinctively begins treating it as art. That is precisely the joke.