Tag: queens

A Long Queue With Solemnity, But Also Camaraderie, to Bid Goodbye to Queen Elizabeth

There is a need in Britain to be distracted from the monumental looming problems that the new prime minister will have to now address.

London: It was of course inevitable that Queen Elizabeth II would one day die, but it seemed as if it would never actually need to happen, certainly not till she after reached the age of 100 in four years time. When the monarch suddenly did go on September 8, it caused a shock that tens of thousand of people have been now coming to terms with by joining a long queue for up to 24 hours to spend just a few moments at her Lying in State.

This need to come to terms with what has happened is one of the main reasons why so many have travelled to London from across the country to show affectionate respect and say goodbye to the only British head of state most of them have known – more than 80% of the country’s 57 million population were born after the Queen inherited the crown from her father King George VI in 1952.

“Respect” was the reply I heard most often on Friday morning when I asked people in the queue on the River Thames path at Lambeth why they had come. Many had got up at 3 am or earlier to walk five miles through the day for just a few moments at the Lying in State.

Making new friends and sharing food is all part of the overall experience that makes it memorable and worthwhile, even if it means walking slowly through a bitter cold night – organised and helped by police, security contractors, volunteer civil servants and young scouts and guides.

David Beckham, the former English football captain and star, summed it up when he said on BBC TV: ”We all want to be here together and we all want to experience something where we celebrate the amazing  life of our queen. Something like this is meant to be shared together eating Pringles, sherbet lemon and doughnuts  and drinking coffee.”

In the queue, Ben and Diana told me they remembered when they were children watching the Queen being crowned in 1953 on their families’ first black and white televisions. “We need to make this gesture to say goodbye,” Ben said, “We are here for Charles and William too, to give them succour and show our support for them now as their grieve and in the future,” Diana added referring to the new King and his son and heir.

Everyone seemed relaxed and cheerful, even though most had been in line since 5 am or earlier and probably had five hours or more to go. They could see the Palace of Westminster, where the Queen was lying in state, across the Thames, but knew there were three or four more hours ahead including a final park where the queue stretches airport-style in circulating lines. 

Woo Seung Shin, originally from Korea, had linked up with six other people he’d never met before. They’d got on so well they’d set up a WhatsApp group called ‘Queen’s Guys and Dolls’. “We’ve been together ten hours,” said Sonya Madden, a Hong Kong banker-turned-fashion designer. “That’s the equivalent of four or five dates”

Shin was there because he’d met the Queen personally and talked with her as head of a Korean scientists and engineers association in 2004 when his country’s president had visited the UK.

The mood changes and the crowd becomes quieter in the final minutes after crossing a large tented security checking area. Then people finally enter Westminster Hall, as I did soon after the Lying in State began on the 14th. 

Arriving at the top of a wide flight of stairs, you see a dramatic sea of light and a pool of colour with the Queen’s coffin in the middle of a breath-taking image of purple, gold and red. It is raised on a high plinth with the spectacular Imperial State Crown and symbolic orb and sceptre, with white flowers, draped in the Royal Sovereign flag.  On steps around the plinth stand helmeted guardsmen and brightly coloured Beefeaters (who guard the Tower of London), heads bowed.

Down the stairs, people file slowly past the coffin, some crying, some making the sign of the cross, some bowing, while others gaze and savour what is probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“She never put a foot wrong, I felt I knew her,” Morna from Hereford had told me in the queue.“She never gave up on us, I wanted to say thank you,” someone else said.

Yutao from Guangzhou in China who has lived in the UK for eleven years and had heard about the Queen before he and his partner arrived, simply said, ”We wanted to show our respect”. That point was repeated by another young man who told me, “You’d be annoyed in ten years time, looking back, if you hadn’t come”.

The area around the Palace of Westminster which houses the parliament and the ancient Westminster Hall, has become a closely controlled security zone in the past week. Pedestrians are free to walk along designated pavement corridors, but streets are sealed to traffic with heavy barricades.

Thousands of people are today travelling into London for the climax on Monday when the funeral takes place in Westminster Abbey and the coffin then leaves, first drawn on a gun carriage and then by car, for burial in Windsor, an hour or so’s drive away. 

A member of the Royal Guard walks outside Westminster Hall as people visit to pay respects to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, following her death, in London, Britain, September 16, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Clodagh Kilcoyne

There are expected to be 10,000 police in what has been described as London’s biggest ever security operation to protect the 500 heads of state, prime ministers and other dignitaries who are expected to attend the funeral – including President Biden, but not Vladimir Putin who was not invited (because of Ukraine) and Xi Jinping, who was invited (despite his actions in Hong Kong and with the Uyghurs) but is sending vice president Wang Qishan.

When the Queen’s mother died in March 2002, I was in London and wrote (in the Business Standard) that the massive adulation for her memory “showed how useful high profile deaths and funerals can be for dynasties”. Throughout history they had “provided occasions for families to re-establish their supremacy and national importance”. Political parties can gain from them and “the death of a revered royal enables the family to present itself to its people at its best”.

That is what is being achieved here with (again quoting from 2002) “carefully calibrated pomp and grand precision”. The events then, as now, had “left no-one in any doubt that Britain can still do at least one thing well – stage grand pageants that draw the people onto the streets and bind the country together.”

There is a national need to be distracted from current problems at a time when Britain’s prospects in the near term are not bright. After the suffering of the covid pandemic and more recent economic upheavals of Brexit, energy prices are soaring, recession is looming and the pound at its lower level since 1985 – and there is a new untested prime minister, Liz Truss, who took office just two days before the Queen died.

There is less instant respect overall now than in 2002 for the monarchy, and King Charles has to prove its value in order to preserve the dynasty. His main aim, along with establishing his own charisma and popularity, is to unite the UK at a time when Scotland is threatening a second independence referendum that could cause ructions in Wales and Northern Ireland – all places he has visited in the past week. 

So far he has done well with Queen Camilla but, inevitably, not that everything has gone to plan. Aside from squabbles about how visiting dignitaries should be treated, the King has twice revealed his known imperious impatience with details in the past few days.

On the first occasion, an ink stand was stupidly placed on a cramped table between the King and the documents he had to sign, so he impatiently wiggled his wrist to demand it should be removed. Then, a day or two later, he forgot the date that had to go with his signature, and the pen he was given leaked. “I can’t bear this bloody thing…every stinking time,” he exclaimed, walking off – all recorded close-up on television.

That has led to him being mocked on TikTok and twitter where there is only a flicker of sympathy for the immense pressure he has been under when he has just lost his mother and has done all the travelling, speeches at religious and civic occasions, and greeting crowds.

Now there is a weekend of meeting people involved in all the ceremonies, visiting the Lying in State queues with Prince William, and greeting foreign leaders before the Monday funeral.

The celebratory pilgrimage has brought tens of thousands not just to the Lying in State but also to nearby Green Park where masses of flowers have been laid since last weekend, and to the area around Buckingham Palace, the main royal residence. More are pouring into the capital to be here during the weekend and on Monday. 

They are all showing their “respect” for the Queen but Charles, while dealing with his own personal grief, is also ensuring that the second part of the saying, “The Queen is dead, long live the King” comes true.

John Elliott is a journalist.

New York: Two Sikh Men Assaulted, Robbed in Queens as Crimes Against Sikhs on the Rise

The two men were attacked in Richmond Hill, the same Queens neighbourhood where Sikh septuagenarian Nirmal Singh was assaulted earlier this month.

New York: In the second such assault in less than 10 days, two Sikh men were attacked and robbed in Queens, the same neighbourhood in the city where an elderly Sikh man was assaulted earlier this month.

The Consulate General of India in New York said in a tweet that the assault on the two Sikh gentlemen in Richmond Hill, New York is deplorable.

We have approached the local authorities and New York City Police Department in the matter, the Consulate said.

It added that it notes that a police complaint has been filed in the incident and one person has been arrested. The Consulate said that it is in touch with community members and that it is “ready to offer all assistance to the victims.

Community-based civil and human rights organisation, The Sikh Coalition, said that the two Sikh individuals were attacked and robbed in Richmond Hill on Tuesday, April 12.

The attack happened close to the area where septuagenarian Nirmal Singh was punched in an unprovoked assault on April 3.

The attack on the two individuals came on the same day as a shooting on a Brooklyn subway that injured 16 people, ten of whom received gun shot wounds and five others were left in critical but stable condition.

The police is on the lookout for the suspect, believed to be a black male who, wearing a gas mask, opened a smoke canister inside the subway train as it approached the 36th Street station in Brooklyn Tuesday morning. The suspect then opened fire, striking multiple people on the subway and on the platform.

Commenting on the latest attack, Queens Borough president Donovan Richards said that it is another difficult day in the Richmond Hill area, as we learn of a second attack on a Sikh neighbour days after Singh’s assault.

He said his office has been in contact with police authorities to ensure that justice is served and that Queens’ Sikh community deserve nothing less.

New York City council member Shahana Hanif, who represents Brooklyn, tweeted about the two incidents:

The Sikh Coalition said that out of respect for their privacy, it was not sharing the names of the two Sikh individuals, who are responsive and getting medical care.

However, video footage shared on social media showed the two individuals surrounded and being attended to by locals and police personnel. One of the injured is seeing sitting on the side of the road, while another is standing next to him, covering an injury near his eye with a cloth. In the video, the two Sikh men are seen without turbans on their head.

The Sikh Coalition said it is in direct touch with the New York Police Department (NYPD) Hate Crimes Task Force, which has shared that one suspect is in custody while the search is on for another attacker.

Also read: US State Dept Says ‘Deeply Disturbed’ by Attack on Sikh Cab Driver at JFK Airport

Law enforcement believes both men were targeted for being Sikh and said that the attacks are being investigated as anti-Sikh hate crimes, the Sikh Coalition said.

We also remind everyone that no one community is deserving of – or responsible for – hate crimes. In these difficult moments, anti-Black racism is directly harmful to our shared efforts to stop the hate violence that endangers us all, the coalition added.

The organisation noted that the news of the attack comes amidst a separate mass shooting and violence at the Brooklyn subway station. “The entire local community is in our thoughts as that other investigation moves forward,” it said.

NY state assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar said that as the first Punjabi American ever elected to New York state office, she, in unequivocal terms, stresses that there is zero tolerance for hate crimes against the Sikh-American community in New York state.

She said that she had spoken to the NYPD after both the incidents and is calling for both incidents to be investigated as hate crimes and the perpetrators brought to justice.

She noted that there has been an alarming 200% rise in hate crimes against the Sikh community in recent years. She passed a historic resolution whereby New York state recognises April as Punjabi month.

“We will educate all on Sikh culture so that everyone knows as I do, the generosity and kindness embedded in the Sikh-American community, and together, with my partners in Congress and the Mayor, we will give law enforcement the tools they need to fully investigate and prosecute these crimes of bias.

Early this month, Nirmal Singh was punched in an unprovoked assault and images shared on social media showed Singh with a bloodied turban, face and clothes.

The Consulate had said in a tweet that it was deeply disturbed by the assault on the elderly Sikh gentleman in Richmond Hill, Queens.

“We condemn the violent attack and are in touch with the NYPD and local authorities who are investigating the matter,” it said. “We are also in touch with local community organisations for the well-being of the victim.”

New York city police commissioner Keechant Sewell said that NYPD chief of detectives James Essig was investigating the assault of the elderly Sikh man.

“Together in every community, we denounce violence in our city and the person(s) responsible will be apprehended,” he said.

Singh was a tourist visiting from India and he was able to walk back after the assault to the cultural centre where he has been staying since he arrived in New York City. Singh was transported to a local hospital where he has been treated for pain and a laceration to the face. The Sikh Coalition said Monday that Singh returned to India where he can be in the care of his family.

According to the organisation, Singh’s son Manjit Singh said that his family hopes that the suspect in his father’s assault case will be arrested because the family sees this as an attack on all who wear turbans and other articles of faith and even though Manjit’s father has left New York, they will do everything they can to continue helping the investigation

What Big History Says About How Royal Women Exercise Power

Paula Sabloff of the Santa Fe Institute attempts to identify a norm for queenly power by comparing the roles and political clout of royal women in eight premodern societies spanning five continents and more than 4,000 years.

Eleanor of Aquitaine is often portrayed as one of the most powerful queens in history. Wife, mother and counsellor of kings, crusader, landowner, patron of the arts, her power eventually grew so great – at least in the eyes of one royal husband, Henry II of England – that he chose to lock her up. But what if Eleanor wasn’t exceptional? What if, in the manner and the degree to which she exerted power, she was very much in line with royal women throughout history?

That suggestion is not original. It has been raised by a persistent if minority chorus of academics – mainly feminist archaeologists such as Joyce Marcus and Joan Gero – for decades, but the problem has always been identifying a norm for queenly power.

In a recently published paper, the political anthropologist Paula Sabloff of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico attempts to do just that, by comparing the roles and political clout of royal women in eight premodern societies spanning five continents and more than 4,000 years.

The Santa Fe Institute is dedicated to the study of complexity, and it is adept at processing large quantities of data to that end. In the past decade, its researchers have turned their attention to human history, asking if pooling data about the past can improve our interpretation of the historical record and using statistical analysis to identify patterns in them.

This approach might be called ‘big history’, by analogy with ‘big data’ (though the term ‘big history’ has been used in other ways too), and some of its advocates have written about it on Aeon. With only eight polities to its name, Sabloff’s study doesn’t claim to be big history, but it does claim to have comparative power. It throws up some striking similarities between societies that, because they were so far apart in time and space, cannot have copied each other. It’s the closest anyone has yet come to identifying a queenly norm.

Also read: Remembering Ruma Guha Thakurta: The First Lady of Indian Choir Music

With the help of a small army of students and citizen scientists, over a period of five years, Sabloff built a series of databases on fourteen premodern states. Of those, eight had enough information on royal women to support comparison. The oldest was Old Kingdom Egypt (2686-2181 BCE), the youngest protohistoric Hawai’i – a society that lasted from the 16th century CE until the first Europeans arrived in 1778.

In between fall Aztec, Inka, Maya, Zapotec, Late Shang China and the Mari Kingdom of Old Babylonia. They range from city-states with populations in the tens of thousands, to empires comprising tens of millions. Some practised primogeniture, others did not. They varied with respect to their rules on succession, women rulers, marriage between kin and gender separation – meaning that each gender had its matched ruler. In short, they were worlds apart.

And yet, says Sabloff: ‘This same structure pops out.’ In all eight societies, royal women exerted power in at least four ways: they influenced policy; they influenced the behaviour of those both above and below them in rank; they acted as go-betweens, and they patronised clients. In addition, they were often involved in determining the succession, governing, building alliances, and expanding or defending territory.

The most powerful of all were the queen rulers. They were rare – the only society in Sabloff’s sample that tolerated them was the Maya – but they packed almost as much political punch as their male counterparts. In the 7th century CE, Lady K’awiil Ajaw of Cobá in the Yucatan peninsula presided over a formidable group of warriors and statesmen, and when she died, she left behind one of the most successful kingdoms in Mayan history.

Even if they were barred from the top job, these women were powerful. In four of the societies, widows of rulers acted as regents for their sons and had the same policymaking powers as male rulers. Lady Hao of China lost her status as the main wife on the death of her son but clawed it back by recruiting an army of more than 13,000 and leading it to war.

The Hawai’ians practised gender separation, and royal women’s power was limited with respect to men’s, but it was still considerable. They controlled the same amount of wealth, made their own deals, distributed their own gifts, proposed improvements to agriculture and aquaculture, and ordered executions – and pardons.

Also read: Watch | ‘Women Have No Name in My Country.’

The most richly documented case in Sabloff’s sample is that of the Mari kingdom of the second millennium BCE, thanks to a corpus of close to 20,000 documents – clay tablets scripted in Akkadian – unearthed from the city’s remains by French archaeologists in the 1930s. Most of the documents are administrative, but the cache also contains hundreds of letters exchanged between King Zimri-Lim and his wives and married daughters, and they reveal how powers were parcelled out between them. ‘These were active women,’ says Nele Ziegler, an assyriologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, who has studied the corpus for decades. ‘When the king was absent, it was the queen and not the prime minister or anyone else who was the most important person at court.’ The king was absent very often, she notes, since the war was an almost constant state of affairs at that time.

Sabloff forces us to ask what we mean by the political agency. In most cases, for example, the women had no say in whom they married. They were used as bargaining chips by their male relatives in an eternally shifting landscape of political alliances. They answered to their husbands and were usually excluded from war- and policymaking. But they found other ways to exert influence, some of which were not available to men.

They gave birth to future heirs, of course, and in many of the societies, succession was bilateral – meaning that it could pass via the maternal or paternal lines. ‘These women had blood power,’ says Sabloff. They spied for their kin, with whom their loyalty often remained. One Aztec princess burned her husband’s town so that her father could conquer it more easily.

They were singers and storytellers at court, and they used these arts to influence behaviour – think Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights. And it was not uncommon for them to monopolise access to the gods. Main wives consulted oracles on behalf of their husbands or conveyed prophecies or dreams. ‘Concerning the report on the military campaign which my lord undertakes,’ wrote Zimri-Lim’s main wife Shibtu to her husband, while he was away fighting a rival, ‘I have asked a man and a woman about the signs when I plied [them with drink], and the oracle for my lord is very favourable.’

Also read: A Girl Named ‘No More’ Offers a Lesson in Gender Equality

Royal women often succeeded in building political agency even though they were pawns, Sabloff concludes, and their societies allowed them to. The roles they filled and the powers they wielded overlapped with those of their male counterparts, but they weren’t the same, and the women put them at the service of different – sometimes competing – constituencies. Marcus, Gero and others were therefore right when they said that societal change – history – could not be understood if they were ignored.

When seen in the company of her royal sisterhood, Eleanor begins to look more ordinary. But with great power comes great responsibility, and they (like she) miscalculated from time to time. In another letter to her husband, Shibtu announced that an oracle had foreseen his victory over the Babylonian king Hammurabi. Zimri-Lim’s trail goes cold in 1761 BCE when Hammurabi sacked Mari, and Shibtu’s goes cold with it.Aeon counter – do not remove

Laura Spinney is a science writer whose work has been published in The Economist, National Geographic, Nature, New Scientist and The Telegraph, among others.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Despite Saying Copyright Is for Losers, Banksy Finally Goes to Court

Banksy may have won an action to stop unauthorised products featuring his work, but the artist will need to accept the market-driven logic underpinning their legal protection.

Copyright is for losers – or so Banksy once claimed. But the days of the mysterious artist’s dislike for intellectual property now appear to be long gone, as he has recently won a case of unauthorised merchandising in Italy.

The unauthorised copying of Banksy works is widespread – a stroll through London’s popular markets in Camden and Brick Lane, and a quick search online proves that. His work has been printed and reproduced on everything from mugs to mouse mats. But despite previous rumours that Banksy’s lawyers have sent letters to complain about his artworks being exploited, it seems so far that these objections have not made their way into courtrooms.

However, at the end of 2018, Pest Control, the handling service that authenticates Banksy’s artworks, took action against an Italian company that organised an exhibition – The art of Banksy. A visual protest – for Milan’s Mudec Museum. The event opened in November 2018, and runs until April 2019.

In January, a provisional ruling by a court in Milan ordered the museum to stop selling merchandise which reproduced Banksy’s branded art. While the works on display were either original, or authentic prints, the organisers were also selling products such as notebooks, diaries, postcards, bookmarks and erasers, all of which incorporated Banksy’s art.

Banksy’s flower thrower, as painted in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour. Credit: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Shutterstock

Pest Control enforced its trademark rights over the Banksy name and his iconic pieces Girl with balloon and Flower thrower. It did so to stop the unauthorised merchandising, as well as the use of Banksy imagery in the promotional material produced by the exhibition’s organisers. While the Milan judge noted that the use of Banksy’s name and art on merchandise amounted to trademark infringement, he denied wrongdoings with regards to the promotional material. The court stressed that the use of Banksy’s art on such material is informative in the sense that it is necessary to describe the contents of the show.

Changing legal strategy

So should we now expect more legal actions by Banksy, in courts around the world? If the artist, who has long tolerated other people copying, appropriating and exploiting his art, is changing his strategy it wouldn’t be a bad thing. After all, artists have good reasons to ask for intellectual property protection, whether they produce works in the studio or paint in the streets. They put effort and creativity in producing art, and the law should reward them accordingly. And indeed several graffiti writers and street artists have also recently fought to protect their works on copyright grounds.

Although the court confirmed that Pest Control trademark registrations were valid, the judge noted that the documents filed in the proceedings showed just limited use of Banksy brand. Basically, the Banksy logo is only used on certificates of authenticity released on Pest Control letterhead, and on some canvas frames.

This is a clear weak point in Banksy and Pest Control’s legal strategy going forward. If Banksy wants to keep enforcing any of his trademarks in courts around the world, and avoid the risk of them being cancelled for lack of use, he will need to show judges stronger evidence of his brands being used in the market.

This probably means he needs to start regularly producing and selling his own branded merchandise through a specialised commercial vehicle, which so far has not really happened – and may be considered by Banksy himself as antithetical to the very anti-capitalistic message he wants to convey through his art.

What is also noteworthy in this case is that Pest Control has decided not to enforce Banksy’s copyright. Such a decision doesn’t come as a surprise though, as it would require Pest Control to show judges that it has acquired the copyright from the artist. But this would entail the disclosure of Banksy’s real name, which the artist obviously doesn’t want to reveal as it would remove the aura of mystery surrounding him, and consequently reduce the value of his art.

Also read: Banksy and the Tradition of Destroying Art

All in all, this legal action in Milan confirms once again Banksy’s ambiguity. He is an artist that started a suit to stop the commercial and unauthorised use of a brand which he deliberately does not use in the market (probably to avoid blurring the anti-consumerist nature of his art).

But Banksy cannot have it both ways. If he wants to fight regularly (and successfully) against the unauthorised exploitation of his works, especially his brands, he will need to accept the market-driven logic underpinning their legal protection, and start a proper business plan which includes merchandising of his own art, as most art entrepreneurs do.

After all, it is entirely possible to create art to send anti-establishment messages and at the same time legally protect the commercial side of it.

Enrico Bonadio, Senior Lecturer in Law, City, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Amazon Scraps Plans for New York City Headquarters

Amazon’s sudden pullout from NYC prompted finger-pointing as NY state governor Andrew Cuomo blamed the loss on local politicians.

New York: Amazon.com Inc abruptly scrapped plans to build a major outpost in New York that could have created 25,000 jobs, blaming opposition from local leaders upset by the nearly $3 billion in incentives promised by state and city politicians.

The company said on Thursday it did not see consistently ‘positive, collaborative’ relationships with state and local officials. Opponents of the project feared congestion and higher rents in the Long Island City neighbourhood of Queens, and objected to handing billions in incentives to a company run by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man.

State senator Michael Gianaris, who represents Queens and was a vocal critic of the deal, told a news conference on Thursday that the Amazon subsidies were unnecessary.

“This was a shakedown, pure and simple,” he said.

Amazon’s sudden pullout from NYC prompted finger-pointing by Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo, the politicians who crafted the deal. Cuomo angrily blamed the loss on local politicians while Bill de Blasio blamed Amazon.

Cuomo said in a statement that a small group of politicians had ‘put their own narrow political interests’ above those of New Yorkers.

The year-long search for its so-called HQ2 culminated in Amazon picking Northern Virginia and NY after hundreds of municipalities, from Newark, NJ to Indianapolis competed for the coveted tax-dollars and high-wage jobs the project promised.

Amazon said it would not conduct a new headquarters search and would focus on growing at other existing and planned offices. The company already has more than 5,000 employees in NYC and plans to continue to hire there, Amazon said on Thursday.

A Siena College Poll conducted earlier this month found 56% of registered voters in NYC supported the Amazon deal, while 36% opposed it.

City shakedown?

Some New Yorkers mounted protests after the deal was announced, angered by the $2.8 billion in incentives promised to Amazon and fearing further gentrification in a neighbourhood once favoured by artists looking for cheap studio space.

US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a critic of the project and a self-described democratic socialist whose district spans parts of Queens and the Bronx, cheered the reversal by the world’s third most valuable public company.

“Anything is possible: today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbours defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world,” she wrote on Twitter.

People briefed on the decision said Amazon had made the decision early on Thursday amid rising concerns about the small vocal minority. The people said Amazon will not shift any of the planned jobs to Tennessee where an operations hub is planned or Virginia but plans to grow its existing network of locations.

Amazon had not acquired land for the project, making it easy to scrap its plans, a person briefed on the matter told Reuters on Friday.

Lost opportunity?

In a statement, de Blasio blamed Amazon for failing to address local criticism.

“We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbour and do business in the greatest city in the world,” he said. “Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity.”

Some long-time residents in Long Island city, which sits across the East River from midtown Manhattan’s skyscrapers, feared being forced out by rising rents and untenable pressure on already overburdened subway and sewage systems. High-rise towers have sprouted across the neighbourhood in recent years.

“This is a stunning development, with Amazon essentially giving in to vocal critics,” said Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com. The about-turn could spook other companies thinking about expanding in New York, he added.

Alphabet Inc’s Google has avoided competitions between cities for offices, and its growing presence in lower Manhattan has met with little serious blowback.

Google said in December it plans to invest more than $1 billion on a new campus in NY to double its current headcount of more than 7,000 people.

“I think the (Amazon) PR event turned out to be a mistake,” said Jason Benowitz, senior portfolio manager at the Roosevelt Investment Group, who owns Amazon shares.

Shares of Amazon fell 1%.

‘Really good poker players’

Hours before the announcement, Amazon officials in NYC betrayed no knowledge of the deal’s cancellation when they met with local community members on Thursday morning, said Kenny Greenberg, a neon artist and member of Long Island city’s community board.

“Either they are really good poker players or they were not aware,” Greenberg said of the Amazon representatives. “There was no hint of this at all.”

The meeting with Amazon officials had been held to answer concerns from the community about labour conditions for Amazon’s warehouse and delivery workers and the company’s opposition to labour unions.

US Representative Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat whose district includes the proposed site, lamented the loss of jobs and new revenues.

“This is not the Valentine that NY needed,” she wrote, adding that she had been ready to push for changes to the deal to address local concerns.

How 21 Artists Famously Graffitied a Man’s Property, Sued Him When He Knocked It Down and Won $6.7m

In a landmark court decision in New York, graffiti has been ruled to be proper art worthy of recognition and protection.

In a landmark court decision in New York, graffiti has been ruled to be proper art worthy of recognition and protection.

Credit: Nigel Morris/Flickr, CC BY-SA

It’s an extraordinary tale with a whiff of Banksy about it, although surprisingly, he was not involved. In a landmark ruling, 21 New York street artists have sued and won US$6.7m in damages from the owner of a building who destroyed their graffiti when he had the building demolished.

Following a three-week trial in November, on February 12, Judge Frederic Block ruled against Jerry Wolkoff, owner of the 5Pointz complex in Queens, conferring the biggest award of $1.3m on the building’s mastermind-curator, graffiti artist Meres One, real name Jonathan Cohen.

5Pointz mastermind Jonathan Cohen, aka Meres One, who won $1.3m in the landmark court ruling.
Thee Erin/Flickr, CC BY-SA

The demolition of the former factory site turned graffiti mecca began in August 2014. The year before, artists had tried to oppose the warehouse’s destruction, but an attempt to win an injunction to prevent the owner from knocking it down was unsuccessful.

In the 1990s, Wolkoff had agreed to allow the derelict factory to be used as a showcase for local graffiti talent. Called the Phun Factory, it was later renamed 5Pointz by Meres One in 2002. Under the artist’s watchful eye, it evolved into an “aerosol art centre” and became famous the world over, a huge draw for graffiti aficionados and tourists alike.

In the end, Wolkoff profited from the graffiti and its destruction, when the value of the complex went up from $40m to $200m and permission to build luxury condos was obtained. Destroying 5Pointz, the judge stressed, permitted Wolkoff to realise that value.

Proper works of art

Judge Block accepted that 45 artworks at the centre of the case had “recognised stature” and must receive protection under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), a piece of legislation which was introduced in the US in 1990 to protect artists’ moral rights – but has rarely been applied in their favour.

The rationale used by the court to confirm these artworks were of merit was crucial. To be considered such, works of art don’t need to be mentioned in academic publications or be considered masterpieces, as the expert for the property owner had argued.

It was enough, the judge said, for the 5Pointz artists to show their professional achievements in terms of residences, teaching positions, fellowships, public and private commissions as well as media coverage and social media presence.

Judge Block also carefully examined Wolkoff’s behaviour. The artworks – even those that could be easily removed as they had been placed on plywood panels – were whitewashed prior to demolition without giving artists the 90-day notice required by VARA. And the owner did so, the judge stressed, while conscious of the fact the artists were pursuing a VARA-based legal action. Such behaviour, the judge concluded, was not acceptable.

Such blatant disregard for an important legal provision pushed the judge to award the artists the maximum amount of damages allowable under the law. And although he did not grant the injunction requested by the artists in 2013, the judge had warned Wolkoff that he would be exposed to potentially high damages if the artworks were finally considered of “recognised stature”, as they were by the February 12 ruling.

5Pointz drew street art aficionados from all over the world with its wildly imaginative and inventive graffiti. Paxti Moraleda/Flickr, CC BY-SA

The court also took into account that 5Pointz had become an attraction for visitors to New York, with busloads of tourists, schoolchildren and even weddings heading to the site. Also thanks to Meres One’s savvy stewardship for more than a decade, not only was the complex painted regularly by talented graffiti artists from all over the world, 5Pointz also attracted movie producers, advertising companies and bands, and was used as a location for the climax for the 2013 film Now You See Me.

The judge did not attach much importance to the fact that several artworks at 5Pointz were not meant to be permanent, an argument that had also been relied on by Wolkoff to claim that the pieces could not be protected. But the court reminded him that VARA protects both permanent and temporary art. This is an important provision of the law, especially when all that makes a work transient is the site owner’s expressed intention to remove it.

Art vs property

This ruling may well embolden other graffiti artists to sue property owners who destroy artworks without following the correct procedure, even beyond the US. It may also make owners of buildings whose walls host graffiti more careful. Most important, the huge amount of damages awarded in this case will convince many that ignoring legal provisions and disregarding legitimate graffiti art is not a good idea. Judge Block made clear he awarded the maximum penalty allowable to deter other building owners from behaving in the same disrespectful way as Wolkoff.

5Pointz in Queens was an old factory that was turned into an aerosol art centre. P Lindgren, CC BY-SA

Finally, the decision clearly marks the evolution of graffiti and street art, long considered to be temporary or transient artforms. It is now clear that artistic movements such as these aim to become more permanent forms of art, and that they have achieved a status similar to the one traditionally held by works of “fine art”.

The ConversationSo the gap between “street art” and “fine art” is narrowing. As 5Pointz curator Meres One put it: “This case will probably change the way art is perceived for generations to come.”

Enrico Bonadio, Senior Lecturer in Law, City, University of London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.