Banksy’s monkeys are charming — we need more feelgood art (2024)

Two elephants lean out of bricked-up windows trumpeting an enthusiastic greeting. A goat, balanced precariously on a parapet, peers down at the collapsing scree. A troop of monkeys swing from a railway bridge. It’s Banksy, but not as we know him.

The three Banksy murals unveiled this week in London on the side of a residential building in Chelsea (the elephants), overlooking Kew Bridge (the goat) and across Brick Lane (the monkeys) are, by Banksy standards, charming. No monstrous rats, no menacing seagulls, no obvious, angry, sprayed-on message. They are certainly a far cry from the mocked-up inflatable migrant boat that Banksy sent crowd-surfing over the Glastonbury festival a month ago.

Has Banksy gone soft or has he just read the present mood? It’s August, it’s the summer holidays, the nation is reeling from the violence and disorder of the past ten days. Did Banksy say to himself: enough with the agitprop, let’s give them a giggle?

Can art cheer you up? On a sunny morning with a postcard of the painter Hayley Barker’s California garden propped up on my desk, I’d say a resounding: yes. Not that you get much chance to be cheerful in my line of work. Press releases pour into my inbox for exhibitions that offer “a searing indictment of …”, “an unflinching exploration of …”, “a visceral examination of …” followed by a litany of all the ills of the world.

I wrote recently that we tend to glorify the tortured soul while taking for granted, even denigrating, the cheerful, can-do sort. As with artists, so with art. Bleak art is powerful and profound, uplifting art a bit, well … basic. Greetings card fodder, chocolate box stuff. While I could gaze at Barker’s gardens all day — see them at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh until August 31 — I admit I have relatively little enthusiasm for jaunty paintings of other people’s cats, dogs or babies. Happy-making needn’t mean mawkish.

Perhaps art that boosts the mood depends in part on the element of surprise: the unexpected parting of the clouds on an otherwise gloomy day. I never fail to feel cheered by Eduardo Paolozzi’s mosaics on the platform at Tottenham Court Road Underground station that offer a shot in the arm to crammed commuters, or by Annabel Grey’s 17 different takes on a marble arch, each more joyously exuberant than the last, at Marble Arch station.

Anyone walking through Wakefield in West Yorkshire on an overcast morning would be pleased to come across Annie Morris’s sculpture of balancing bronze orbs. As it happens, Morris’s Stack series came from her grief at the loss of her first child to stillbirth. “My sculptures,” she said, “are about holding onto something that’s fallen, and to express the hope and defiance of life.” Her work is buoyant and beautiful — and in Wakefield goes a long way to cheering up the (grey) square outside the (grey) West Yorkshire History Centre. Elsewhere Yayoi Kusama has turned the mental collapses she has suffered since childhood into works of art that bring joy and wonder to many. Her huge, incongruous gourds growing out of jetties and public piazzas inspire wide jack-o’-lantern grins.

Too much public art is ponderous. Of course we need cenotaphs and memorials but also sculptural mood-boosts under a blue sky. The Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square is often one of the worst offenders when it comes to overworked and underwhelming sculptures. The nearby Serpentine Pavilion often feels more “last resting place” than “picnic in the park”.

It is a shame that Chila Kumari Burman’s ice-cream van with leaping tiger didn’t get the next Fourth Plinth spot — it is instead going to a monument made up of the faces of hundreds of trans people arranged in the form of a Mesoamerican skull rack. Over the wretched winter lockdown of 2020, Burman’s light installation Remembering a Brave New World lit up the front of Tate Britain. Many Londoners made the pilgrimage along the Thames to see it in the gloaming. It was hectic and hopeful at a time when so many of us were apart and despairing.

• Robert Crampton: Not everything is grim. Here are my reasons to be cheerful

Excess is cheering. Just as cold potatoes and wafer-thin ham would be a mean Sunday lunch and a roast with all the trimmings a hospitable one, so, too, can bounty in art lift the spirits. Think of Jupiter Artland, that Mad Hatter’s tea party of a sculpture park outside Edinburgh with its wonderland landscape sprouting follies, sculptural caprices and a triffid-like orchid by Marc Quinn. There’s even a mosaiced splash pool by the artist Joana Vasconcelos.

If you’re ever in southern Tuscany, make a beeline for the Tarot Garden, a blissfully bonkers 14-acre sculpture park designed by the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle and built above Etruscan ruins. Lose yourself in immersive mirror balls, climb glittering turrets and cool your wrists in voluptuous bathing beauty fountains.

Closer to home the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne played a blinder when it asked the artist Lothar Götz to wrap its building in Dance Diagonal, a dazzling, fractured rainbow mural. Pallant House in Chichester has just installed a soaring mesh sculpture by Rana Begum above its staircase — feel your mood rise with it. I still have fond memories of Jim Lambie’s kaleidoscopic steps for the Royal Academy’s 2015 summer exhibition — an august institution impertinently pepped up by a Brighton-rock-striped stair-runner.

Science is on my side: art really can make you happier. A study led by Semir Zeki, a professor of neurobiology at University College London, found that when volunteers were shown reproductions of 28 paintings including Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillère and Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral, their brains released dopamine, the “feelgood” neurotransmitter. Whether you’d see the same positive effects if you showed volunteers the searing and visceral installations that litter my inbox will require further tests.

There is a place for Goya’s Disasters of War, Picasso’s Weeping Woman, John Nash’s paintings of the Western Front and even Banksy’s sunbathing rats and advancing tanks. But there’s room, too, for art that dispels the gloom. With the news as grim as it is, I’ll gladly raise a trumpeting cheer to Banksy’s spray-painted Nellies.