Famed street artist and museum subversive Banksy has pulled off his latest stunt: inserting a fake primitive rock painting into a British Museum exhibit of Roman Britain art.
No one knows how long the exhibit — a depiction of the famous Peckham Rock Painting, depicting early man rolling their shopping trolley on wobbly wheels to an arrow-pierced buffalo — was on display. Curators were only tipped off when Banksy announced on his official website that the first person to spot it at the Museum would win an original Banksy painting of a shopping cart.
A lot of people get really twitchy about Banksy's museum stunts: "How dare he presume himself important enough to be displayed alongside proper artists?" one practically cubed square once sputtered at me. But if the presumption is all that's required for art sophisticates to make a square with their fingers and squint through it at one of his works, that says something about the fatuous art establishment as a whole, in my book.
