Banksy fans were delighted in August as nine animal-themed murals by the street artist appeared across London in as many days. Speculation is rife about what deeper meanings may lie behind the new artworks. Yet according to Pest Control (the body that authenticates Banksy’s work), far too much has been made of them already.
I am a sociologist, not an art critic, but I don’t think the murals are deep meditations on the nature of society. Nor do I think some coded political message will reveal itself now that all the images can be viewed together. The murals have captured the public imagination not because they are artistic masterpieces, but because they play with something beyond the world of pop art: our love, fear and fascination with animals.
In the late 1990s, American sociologists Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders developed the idea of the “sociozoologic scale” to explain how we view different animals. The scale lets us place animals into categories, like “pet”, “food”, or “vermin”, based on their perceived usefulness to society. Some animals, like dogs, tend to be loved and treated well in society because they are seen as loyal and helpful.
Pests and wild predators, on the other hand, tend to be feared and controlled because they don’t fit into what society wants. We all carry the sociozoologic scale around with us in our heads as part of what sociologists have called our “common sense view of the world” – an invisible set of rules that we fol.