August | 2015 | Windswept and Interesting

In the fashion of all our hallowed theme park memories from childhood, our motley crew of four friends set out on a road trip for Weston Super Mare on Saturday morning. The goal? Dismaland. The famed Dystopian Banksy exhibition.

Having tried several times to acquire tickets through the website unsuccessfully (I still to this day haven’t the foggiest idea how people succeeded) we decided to attempt getting walk-in tickets, an act of faith and stupidity we blindly hoped would be rewarded.

After a bleary three hour drive along England’s fine motorways we found ourselves parked and headed to the facade. Handwritten signs read ‘Online Tickets’ (aka. Those Lucky Bastards’) and ‘Walk ups’. Joining the mish mash of hopefuls, we ignored the ‘no more tickets available today’ and hoped for the best. After Lisa deployed her fine questioning skills, we learned that the park would admit 2000 ticket holders at 11am. Should some of them not show, walk ups would be admitted until they reached capacity. From there the queue would not move until 1pm, when 2000 more ticket holders would descend. This would happen again at 3pm. Lisa asked whether there was much chance we would get in; the staff member she spoke to replied with an emphatic no.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a 20-something, university student in me who would have stuck it out, who would have sent friends for beer and food, made up stupid games, and become acquainted with whoever was nearby. That girl wouldn’t have cared about waiting four hours with a potential for crushing failure. But I am no longer that girl. And here’s why…

I know this might surprise you but I didn’t feel like I was missing out. As my friends and I weighed up the likelihood of success, we quickly formulated an alternative course of action. And, perhaps most bizarrely of all, there was something that seemed appropriate about our failed attempt.

You see, for five weeks Banksy has created an exhibition of tremendous hype. The limited run increases its appeal, and the media frenzy has propelled it into a position of pop culture prominence rarely seen by even the most successful of artists. He has also made tickets £3, a price point that shows this work is not about making money (though I’m sure it will), as it could sell tickets easily at ten times the price. The online ticketing service has been fraught with crashes and bugs, making many people simply give up on attempting to use it successfully.

So you have tickets to an exhibition that are highly sought after, which are difficult to buy, and any attempt to show up will result in disappointment. I think the irony is that everyone wants to get in, but the reality is that most people won’t, which makes complete sense, as the work is meant to be the anti-theme park experience, and what is worse that not getting to go? Therfore the most authentic experience is wanting to get in but being shut out.

As we made up our mind and exited the walk ups line, we walked to the front and had our picture taken to commemorate our attempt.

We then walked around the exterior, as the fun fair cacophony rose above the city soundscape. We laughed at those stuck on Ferris Wheel, we contemplated the base of those pieces we could catch mere glimpses of, but then we were more interested in the sand formations made by clams over the tidal plains, and got distracted by an abandoned ball. That’s right people, the hottest ticket in the Northern Hemisphere got upstaged by aquatic life and someone’s discarded sporting equipment.

Two hours later we would walk back past Dismaland after lunch and watch hundreds of people, smiling at each other with a sense of self importance and artistic enlightenment whilst carrying balloons that said, ‘I am an imbecile’, a souvenir from their day out. I wonder how many, if indeed any of them, were aware of the irony.

So kids, what have we learnt? Firstly, it shouldn’t take a decrepit theme park to excite us about modern art. The artists featured at Dismaland have work exhibited all over the world, in exhibitions that are running for longer than five weeks. Go check them out.

Secondly, before you buy into the belief that this is the best and most important art exhibition in history, consider that it might be intentionally crap, and that by going you are the joke.

Just think, if you skip Dismaland, who knows what awesome experiences you might have, such as hiking though Mendip Hills…

….visiting a local fete that’s already closed…