-By Warner Todd Huston
With constant attacks on Walmart because of its pay scale and its evil capitalism it is odd that the retail giant would be selling an anti-capitalism poster art on its website. Well, it was, anyway.
To make matters worse, the anti-capitalism posters were knockoff posters based on the work of a well known artist’s work making it appear as if Walmart was stealing from the artist. On top of that, it was identified to the wrong artist!
The whole messy situation appeared on the Walmart.com website earlier this month where visitors could use the search feature to find “destroy capitalism” products. When putting destroy capitalism in the search bar, one found a poster itself titled “Destroy Capitalism.”
The poster was claimed to be by British artist Banksy. The product was named “Destroy Capitalism by Banksy Canvas Print” and featured a line of people waiting at a vender to buy a t-shirt that said “destroy capitalism” on it.
The listing on the Walmart page.
Worse, the painting isn’t even by the British artist but is the work of another left-wing artist named Eddie Colla.
The third party poster company that had produced the piece was also not paying artist Colla for his work!
Needless to say, artist Colla is not very amused by all this. In fact, he created a new piece of art to celebrate the situation…
Eddie Colla responds.
It’s all a crazy quilt of black eyes for Walmart if I might mix my metaphors.
Walmart, accused of being an evil capitalist, is selling misidentified art printed by a company that is ripping off the artists, and the theme of the art is anti-capitalism.
Neither I nor Alanis Morissette are sure if that’s irony or not, but it sure is a mess.
Walmart has since apologized for the whole thing and removed the offering from its website.
The retail giant also noted that they weren’t the ones that directly contracted to sell the ripped off art. Walmart released a statement to The LAist explaining what happened.
These items are sold through our Marketplace third-party sellers Wayfair and PlumStruck. We’ve taken action to disable the one item in question by Callo, and it will be unpublished later tonight around midnight PT.
We will also instruct Wayfair and Plumstruck to review their artwork to ensure the descriptions are accurate. They’ve provided great products and experiences to our customers and are contracted to comply with product copyright, safety, testing and certification requirements. We’ll work closely with them on the review.
Man, what a mess.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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