Leann Davis Alspaugh at Acroteria:
The artist known as Banksy has made a fortune in graffiti and irony and ironic graffiti. No, he’s not the guy—we now know that Banksy is a middle-aged Englishman named Robin Gunningham—who taped a banana to the wall with silver duct tape. (Maurizio Cattelan sold Comedian at a Sotheby’s auction in 2024 for $6.2 million.) Nor is he responsible for the pair of glasses left on the floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a stunt that the museum took in stride as a Marcel Duchamp-style prank. (The culprits were 17-year olds who in the spirit of “I could have made that” passed off the glasses as art.) Or the two men who, just weeks after the October 2025 Louvre heist, smuggled a fake painting into the museum, a portrait of the two “artists” in Renaissance garb in a frame made of Legos, and hung it on a gallery wall. They filmed themselves and the stunt, of course, went viral.
This kind of sophomoric nonsense makes Banksy’s work seem downright profound. Perhaps his most infamous work was “Love Is in the Bin,” a framed painting from 2006 of a girl with a heart-shaped balloon.
More here.
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