Credit: Dangerous Minds / Lushsux

While reading about Lushsux, all I can remember is how much my mind was blown the first time I heard about Banksy. “Like, it’s graffiti, right? But, like, it’s all political, right! Like, it’s all about society and that. It’s mad.”

God, to live in those halcyon days of the mid 2000s again, where we could be so impressed by something so transparently stupid. Of course, a lot of people saw through it. Many people knew the truth that graffiti has always been a political statement. One that didn’t need some posh kid (and long before we ever knew his identity, it was abundantly clear he was posh), thinking that stencilling a group of kids saluting a Tesco bag hung up like a flag was some profound comment about society.

Whatever your thoughts on the pseudonymous artist’s work, we didn’t know how good we had it. It is always worth remembering that whenever you don’t like something popular, take a moment to appreciate it in the moment, because everything inspired by it is going to be a whole lot worse. Case in point, everyone who’s ever taken to a wall and a can of spray paint with Banksy as their most prominent influence. Banksy’s work is pretty much all faintly diverting bollocks. A facsimile of political art that has vanishingly little to actually say.

Don’t worry, though, we were about to get a whole lot of so-called “political graffiti” that dispensed with the “faintly diverting” and fully embraced everything else. The kind of stuff that makes Banksy at his most sell-out look like It Takes a Nation of Millions…. A generation of people who fundamentally didn’t understand the medium and thought that Banksy had somehow “improved” it, taking to walls across the world with the intention of doing nothing more than making lowest common denominator “provocative” artistic statements.

People like Lushsux, who really did nail it with that name.

Who is Lushsux?

All that we really know of Lushsux is that he is a male artist based in Melbourne, and everything else is kind of up for debate. He’s been around the Melbourne art scene since the mid 2000s, coming to prominence in 2010 after his first gallery show in 2010. By his own admission (Lushsux has done a surprising amount of interviews for someone who fancies themselves as “anonymous”), he looks to create art that’s at the intersection between art and meme.

I’m not going to lie to you and say that there’s not some interesting work to be mined from that attitude. What I am going to say is that none of it comes from the work of Lushsux, whose grand idea seems to boil down to “people recognise this famous person, so I’ll draw 50 Cent as them”. That really does seem to be it. The ‘In Da Club’ hitmaker is a muse of his, and he’s painted the likes of Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump and Taylor Swift as him. Occasionally, he’ll branch out into stuff like Trump and Hilary Clinton making out or Dwayne Johnson as Shrek, but everything, for some reason, comes back to Fiddy.

This is a man who has been supported by two patrons in the Melbourne art scene for over a decade and a half now, and that’s the best he can do, except his response to any criticism of his work is that “it’s just memes”. As if that absolves him of being stupid. Although in terms of his income stream, it could always be worse. In the least surprising move of all time, Lushsux was on the ground floor of NFTs, selling his work as them since 2021. I wonder how that’s working out for him now.

So spare a thought for Banksy, then. We really didn’t know how good we had it until his demon spawn started acting up.