Thursday, September 7, 2006
Banksy strikes Paris!
Banksy strikes Paris debut
11.37, Mon Sep 4 2006
Celebrity Paris Hilton has been hit by "guerilla artist" Banksy after he tampered with hundreds of copies of her latest album.
The underground artist doctored the album sleeves by superimposing a dog's head on top of the singer's topless body, before smuggling the copies into record shops.
The 500 "reworked" albums also came with a sticker on the cover, claiming that the album contained the hits: Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?
A picture of the star emerging from a luxury car inside the accompanying booklet was retouched to include a group of homeless people.
The songs were replaced with a 40-minute CD remixed by an artist, only giving his name as DM, but rumours suggest it could be Danger Mouse - one half of Gnarls Barkley.
It's thought Banksy placed the albums next to the authentic Paris Hilton albums last week. The artist left the original barcode on so people could buy the CD without realising it had been interfered with.
His spokeswoman, Jo Brooks, said he had visited stores in Bristol, Brighton, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow and London.
She said: "They're very subtly done and do look like the original albums.
"You have to look quite carefully to see what he's done.
"I don't like to speak on his behalf but I think he's saying you can be a celebrity but you don't have to do music.
"I don't know what the reaction will be in America or whether she would even get it."
A spokesman for HMV said the chain had recovered seven CDs from two Brighton shops.
"The album hasn't been selling that well so we managed to find three in one store and four in another because there weren't that many on the shelves," he said.
"We're planning to auction them, because presumably they'll be worth quite a bit and highly collectable.
"It's not something we want to see all the time, but with an artist like Banksy we can give him a bit more leeway and he can probably get away with doing things that the rest of us can't.
"He's said something I'm sure a lot of other people will think in regard to her album and the publicity might actually help her sell some more records."
Bristolian Banksy courted controversy with his daring art projects last year when he targeted a security wall in Israel, creating nine stencil sprays on the Palestinian side of the West Bank barrier.
He also placed a painting of a can of Tesco value tomato soup and a woman wearing a gas mask in art galleries in New York.
The British Museum also fell prey to one of his most famous art pranks when he placed a hoax exhibit - entitled Early Man Goes to Market - on the wall, where it went unnoticed by staff for hours.
posted by Dillon Morris @ 7:21 PM
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