Anti-War Prankster Smuggles Art Into Top Museums [View All]

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0325-01.htm

Anti-War Prankster Smuggles Art Into Top Museums


NEW YORK -- Many a visitor to New York's Museum of Modern Art has probably thought, "I could do that."

A British graffiti artist who goes by the name "Banksy" went one step further, by smuggling in his own picture of a soup can and hanging it on a wall, where it stayed for more than three days earlier this month before anybody noticed.

The prank was part of a coordinated plan to infiltrate four of New York's top museums on a single day.

The largest piece, which he smuggled into the Brooklyn Museum, was a 2 foot by 1.5 foot (61cm by 46 cm) oil painting of a colonial-era admiral, to which the artist had added a can of spray paint in his hand and anti-war graffiti in the background.

The other two targets were the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, where he hung a glass-encased beetle with fighter jet wings and missiles attached to its body -- another comment on war, Banksy told Reuters on Thursday.
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A portrait by a British graffiti artist known as 'Banksy' is shown in this undated photo. The work hung on the wall at the Brooklyn Museum, after the artist surreptitiously hung his own works of art in four New York museums