Banksy's Print: Jesus Christ with Shopping Bags (2005)

• Who is Banksy?

Banksy is an pseudonymous United Kingdom-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.  

His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Observers have noted that his style is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris. Banksy says that he was inspired by "3D", a graffiti artist who later became a founding member of Massive Attack, an English musical group.
Banksy displays his art on publicly visible surfaces such as walls and self-built physical prop pieces. Banksy does not sell photographs or reproductions of his street graffiti, but art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder. Banksy's first film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, billed as "the world's first street art disaster movie", made its debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. The film was released in the UK on 5 March 2010. In January 2011, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary for the film. In 2014, he was awarded Person of the Year at the 2014 Webby Awards.
(source: wikipedia) 

• Jesus Christ With Shopping Bags

In 2005 Banksy produced Jesus Christ with Shopping Bags, a stenciled work depicting Jesus Christ crucified and with outstretched arms holding shopping bags. The image features a haloed Jesus in black and white, with his body and shopping bags melting, with a gray background.

In this work Banksy is criticizing the commercialism in society and in particular of Christmas. Rather than being a time of focusing on the Christian values of love, charity, compassion and forgiveness, Christmas has become a time of personal gratification through materialistic consumption. Straight away the audience's eyes are drawn to the salient image which is Jesus Christ. Facial expression and body language display Jesus as downcast, and weighed down by the shopping bags. Jesus' arms directs our attention to the shopping bags. In the shopping bags one can see wrapped presents, a candy cane, and part of a Mickey Mouse doll, emphasizing how this holiday season, which is supposed to celebrate the birth of Jesus, has come to represent consumerism. This contrasts with the teaching of Jesus, who criticized the focus on material things at the expense of moral and spiritual development. The melting objects represent the ephemeral joy brought by material things, and the gray background conveys the gloominess in people’s lives when they are devoid of love, compassion, charity and other intangible values. The lack of colour also represents death and defeat. The use of red symbolises blood, and implies Christianity's loss of its power. The crucifixion represents how people sacrifice themselves for material things, which ultimately do not bring satisfaction.
                Jesus' body acts a vector line that runs down the page (top to bottom structure) to melting feet, symbolising that the message (of Christ's death) is being diluted. The cross has been removed, which again takes away from the meaning of Christ's death and sacrifice. It emphasises how today's society doesn't take Jesus' sacrifice serious any more, and possibly the notion that people today cannot handle the responsibilities of the cross.