“Like most peo­ple who make it in the art world, I bought a yacht to cruise the Med,” Banksy wrote on Insta­gram when intro­duc­ing the Louise Michel, a ves­sel tasked with a some­what dif­fer­ent mis­sion than an arriv­iste par­ty boat: pick­ing up refugees from coun­tries like Libya and Turkey lost at sea. Any­one who’s fol­lowed Banksy’s art career knows he pos­sess­es a well-devel­oped instinct for catch­ing and keep­ing pub­lic atten­tion, and it has hard­ly desert­ed him in this ven­ture. Why spon­sor a refugee res­cue boat, after all, when you can spon­sor a bright pink fem­i­nist refugee res­cue boat, embla­zoned with a piece of orig­i­nal art?

Despite hav­ing been named for the 19th-cen­tu­ry fem­i­nist anar­chist Louise Michel, the motor yacht’s oper­a­tions encom­pass an even wider vari­ety of caus­es: The Guardian’s Loren­zo Ton­do and Mau­rice Stierl quote “Lea Reis­ner, a nurse and head of mis­sion for the first res­cue oper­a­tion,” say­ing that the project is also “meant to bring togeth­er a vari­ety of strug­gles for social jus­tice, includ­ing for women’s and LGBTIQ rights, racial equal­i­ty, migrants’ rights, envi­ron­men­tal­ism and ani­mal rights.” This mul­ti­di­rec­tion­al activism would seem to suit the artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty of Banksy, whose work strikes out in as many crit­i­cal direc­tions as both his admir­ers and detrac­tors can inter­pret.

The Louise Michel, as Ton­do and Stierl report­ed last Thurs­day, “set off in secre­cy on 18 August from the Span­ish sea­port of Bur­ri­ana, near Valen­cia, and is now in the cen­tral Mediter­ranean where on Thurs­day it res­cued 89 peo­ple in dis­tress, includ­ing 14 women and four chil­dren.” After pick­ing up the first group of refugees, reports the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Miri­am Berg­er, “it then encoun­tered a ship trav­el­ing from North Africa to Europe with 130 peo­ple aboard and some bod­ies of peo­ple who had died dur­ing the jour­ney,” and as a result “quick­ly became over­crowd­ed and could not prop­er­ly steer, its Twit­ter posts said.” All this hap­pened “at sea around 55 miles south­east of Lampe­dusa, an Ital­ian island off the North African coast that has become a migra­tion tran­sit point.”

Hours lat­er two oth­er ves­sels, one oper­at­ed by the Ital­ian coast guard and one by a Ger­man non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tion, came to take on pas­sen­gers. Though hard­ly smooth sail­ing, the Louise Michel’s first res­cue mis­sion pro­ceed­ed more favor­ably than some: “A ves­sel named the Talia, which res­cued 52 peo­ple almost two months ago, was­n’t allowed into the port for 5 days,” says Dazed. “Now, a boat named the Eti­enne is in the longest record stand-off between author­i­ties and res­cuers ever, hav­ing spent three weeks at sea being denied dis­em­barka­tion in Mal­ta.” Banksy pub­li­cized the Louise Michel, which he spon­sors with­out involve­ment in its oper­a­tions, only after it had set sail. But for any­one with an inter­est in show­ing the world the dire cir­cum­stances of refugees today, the high­ly vis­i­ble boat’s high­ly vis­i­ble dif­fi­cul­ties cer­tain­ly aren’t bad pub­lic­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Banksy Strikes Again in Venice

Banksy Strikes Again in Lon­don & Urges Every­one to Wear Masks

Banksy Debuts His COVID-19 Art Project: Good to See That He Has TP at Home

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Banksy Shreds His $1.4 Mil­lion Paint­ing at Auc­tion, Tak­ing a Tra­di­tion of Artists Destroy­ing Art to New Heights

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

We hear the phrase “unprece­dent­ed times” every day now, but the truth is few calami­ties in human his­to­ry are more prece­dent­ed than plagues and pesti­lences. In West­ern his­to­ry, at least, dis­ease epi­demics seem always to have been fol­lowed by Machi­avel­lian oppor­tunism and cultish con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries that only made things worse.

Dur­ing the 14th cen­tu­ry, almost six hun­dred years before Nao­mi Klein defined the shock doc­trine, the Black Death “strength­ened the pow­er of the state and accel­er­at­ed the dom­i­na­tion of key mar­kets by a hand­ful of large com­pa­nies,” write Eleanor Rus­sell and Mar­tin Park­er at The Con­ver­sa­tion (hel­lo, Ama­zon). In their argu­ment, dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism may have pre­ced­ed actu­al cap­i­tal­ism, and it start­ed with the plague.

In his his­to­ry of the Great Plague of 1665, Daniel Defoe described how “every­one behaved bad­ly, though the rich behaved the worst,” as Jill Lep­ore writes at The New York­er, forc­ing their ser­vants to put their lives at risk to pro­vi­sion the great hous­es. “This Neces­si­ty…,” writes Defoe, “was in a great Mea­sure the Ruin of the whole City,” though few in Lon­don then under­stood how to slow trans­mis­sion of the dis­ease.

That was not the case when the Influen­za epi­dem­ic took the lives of hun­dreds of mil­lions around the world between 1918 and 1920. Doc­tors under­stood how the flu spread and rec­om­mend­ed that every­one wear a mask in pub­lic. Cities passed ordi­nances and imme­di­ate­ly resis­tance sprang up, lead­ing to orga­ni­za­tions like San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League, whose rhetoric sounds like that of anti-mask pro­tes­tors of today.

The times may be unique—for the speed at which COVID-19 spread around the world, for instance, along with the disinformation—but humans have lived through many ver­sions of pan­dem­ic, and many dis­as­trous­ly self­ish, oppor­tunis­tic, and short-sight­ed respons­es to it. We may con­tem­plate these his­tor­i­cal rep­e­ti­tions as we admire the Insta­gram cre­ations of artist Genevieve Blais, who has been post­ing images of famous paint­ings, stat­ues, and pho­tographs with their sub­jects wear­ing masks.

More than nov­el­ty memes or high­brow pub­lic ser­vice announce­ments, Blais’ cre­ations are part-whim­si­cal/­part-sober­ing reminders of the per­sis­tence of plagues through­out history—their influ­ence on the rise and fall of dynas­ties and pow­er­ful patrons, and the igno­rance and fol­ly that led to so much pre­ventable death. Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing, humans are bet­ter posi­tioned than ever before to com­bat epi­demics of dis­ease. But it’s worth remem­ber­ing the prece­dents for our cur­rent con­di­tions. Plagues have shaped human his­to­ry. We don’t always have to respond to them the same way. See all of Blais’s masked fine art images at her Plague His­to­ry Insta­gram page. If you DM her, she will make you a print.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Hap­pened When Amer­i­cans Had to Wear Masks Dur­ing the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic

Vin­tage Sci­ence Face Masks: Con­quer the Pan­dem­ic with Sci­ence, Cour­tesy of Maria Popova’s Brain­Pick­ings

Down­load Clas­sic Works of Plague Fic­tion: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shel­ley, to Edgar Allan Poe

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness