Foodie on Duty Creeps Into The Village Petstore

Perhaps you’ve seen the billboard ads featuring a scowling, aging waitress holding up two trayfuls of rodents and condiments subtitled, “Do you want flies with that?” If you haven’t checked out Banksy’s art installation, The Village Petstore, I would run over there ASAP.

It’s as if Banksy had chopped up zoo animals, threw their souls through a food processor and shipped them off to a remote factory to be stuffed inside animatronic fish sticks, chicken nuggets and hot dog wieners. In the front display window of the pet shop are two small nuggets pecking away at a plastic trough of sweet and sour dipping sauce. Further inside is a wall of glass boxes housing robotic salamis and wieners lounging about in a slow and hypnotic fashion. Yellow packages of Oscar Meyer deli meats hang from steel hooks like dog collars and leashes. They are neon-orange-stickered with the low, low price of 99-cents. Tin cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew and corned beef line the shelves like cat food. In a gigantic fish bowl, two huge fish sticks swim about, round and round. Imagine twin eels doped up on too much Lexipro.

Crammed inside less than 300 square feet is a macabre zoo of American commodification, consumerism and its penchant for processed fast food. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Banksy released this statement: “New Yorkers don’t care about art, they care about pets. So I’m exhibiting them instead.” It’s telling that Banksy never clarifies whether the “them” are the pets or the New Yorkers themselves, implying that a darker, more disturbing part of New York’s soul has been trapped and relegated to glass terrariums and chicken wire for all the world to see. It is eerie, the degree to which the animatronic faux-fried chicken by-products so closely mirror the behavior of the very hens they come from, and yet are so far removed in their physical appearance.

On the wall of glass terrariums, hot dog wieners lounge around in their buns like snakes while two miniature sausages mechanically hump one another. A sad-looking log of salami sliced into discs near its tail-end moves to and fro, like a confused, drugged-up gerbil in search of something it will never find. The liveliest of pets is a hot dog dressed in a serpentine snake of French’s yellow mustard drinking from a steel dish of water every few seconds like a thirsty puppy. Never satiated.

In this soul-sucking, disturbing display is a direct metaphor for New York consumerism: we are what we eat. Whether or not this rings true for all metropolitan New Yorkers, there is a modicum of truth that lies in the shadows of the way in which the fast-paced urban lifestyle is advertised. For all of our easy accessibility to food, many don’t have the time to pay attention to what they eat or where food comes from or how unrecognizable meat has become in its most processed, preservative-laden state. Like the creepy, adorable nuggets of by-products blindly dipping their beakless mouths into the plastic prism of sweet and sour sauce, the very rhythm of the city makes it disturbingly easy to blindly peck at cheap, processed foods that fail to feed our health.

If you’re not too creeped out to creep in, The Village Petstore is open 10AM-midnight daily until Halloween. Be sure to bring your cameras, as this free freak show is flash-friendly and makes an indelibly cutting remark upon urban commodification and consumerism and the ways in which pets and the pets we have come to personify have been made into spirit-less, trendy fashion accessories.

The Village Petstore
No. 89, 7th Avenue South
Greenwich Village