Deepening Essay — Banksy’s Flower Thrower and Jeffery Cohen’s Monster Culture

Deepening an idea means to extend and explore it in a new context. For this progression, you will discover a contemporary artwork, find the intellectual problem that exhibit takes interest in, and explore how the artist
understands this problem. You’ll also include a contextualizing source like an artist interview or review of the artist’s work in order to fully represent your ideas. Your task is to borrow one idea (some key terms or
concepts) from the primary exhibit and articulate your discoveries about its complexity. You will do this by putting your artwork in conversation with a secondary textual source. By engaging in this process, you will
ultimately form your own idea about an intellectual problem of your very own. Your discovery of this intellectual
problem will provide you with a premise, or occasion to write your essay.
Put another way, what’s a question the artwork leaves unanswered for you that only the essay can help
answer, or at least illuminate in some way? How does one idea, when explored from another perspective, transform your reading of this exhibit as a whole? I ask that you motivate your reading with this question; by
doing so you will not limit your analysis to identifying similarities between the two texts, but by also considering what their differences can teach you.