http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/arts/design/24arti.html
(photos online)
March 24, 2005
Need Talent to Exhibit in Museums? Not This Prankster
By RANDY KENNEDY
It was not nearly as dangerous as the time he sneaked into the elephant pen
at the London Zoo and scrawled a graffiti message from the point of view of
an elephant: "I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring,
boring, boring."
And it was not quite as elaborate as the stunt last year in which he spirited a stuffed rat wearing wraparound sunglasses into the Natural History Museum in London and mounted it on a wall.
But over the last two weeks, a shadowy British graffiti artist who calls
himself Banksy has carried his own humorous artworks into four New York
institutions - the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History - and attached
them with some sort of adhesive to the walls, alongside other paintings and
exhibits. Similar stunts at the Louvre and the Tate museum have earned the
artist - who will not reveal his real name - a following in Europe, where he
has had successful gallery shows and sold thousands of books of his artwork.
But his graffiti has also landed him in legal trouble.
Elyse Topalian, a spokeswoman for the Met, said that museum officials
believed that a painting found there - a small, gold-framed portrait of a
woman wearing a gas mask - was hung surreptitiously on March 13. Guards
noticed it and removed it from a wall near other paintings in the American
wing, she said. Ms. Topalian added that no damage had been done to the wall
or to other artworks.
The museum does not look kindly on such unauthorized additions to its walls.
"I think it's fair to say that it would take more than a piece of Scotch
tape to get a work of art into the Met," Ms. Topalian said.
Sally Williams, a spokeswoman for the Brooklyn Museum, said a painting - in
this case, of a red-coated colonial-era military officer holding a
spray-paint can, with antiwar graffiti in the background - was discovered
and removed on March 16. The painting was hung between two others from the
museum's permanent collection in the American Identities galleries on the
fifth floor. She said that the painting was now sitting in the museum's
conservation lab and that its fate was uncertain.
"I think the immediate issue was just to get it out of the gallery and tucked away somewhere where it couldn't be seen," she said.
An official at the Museum of Modern Art said that a painting of a can of
cream-of-tomato soup was found hanging in a third-floor elevator lobby and
taken down on March 17. A spokesman for the Museum of Natural History, where
the graffiti artist apparently hung a glass-encased beetle (a real one)
equipped with fighter jet wings, missiles and a satellite dish, confirmed
the incident by e-mail but did not say when the work was found.
Asked whether the incidents raised security concerns for them, officials at
the institutions said no, adding that they believed that they had sufficient
numbers of guards and other monitoring systems.
Pictures of the illicit art installations, apparently taken by an accomplice
of Banksy, were posted yesterday at woostercollective.com, a site that has
become a repository of pictures of graffiti and other street and urban art.
Some of the pictures show a bearded man in an overcoat and hat, looking a
little like Inspector Jacques Clouseau, hanging his paintings in the
museums.
Marc Schiller, a founder of the Web site, said the pictures were sent to him
yesterday along with a statement from the artist that said: "This historic
occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine-art
establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some
high-strength glue."
Mr. Schiller said the artist had returned to London and would not consent to
a telephone interview. But in an e-mail exchange yesterday afternoon,
conducted with Mr. Schiller's help, Banksy - who prefers to be called not an
artist, but a "quality vandal" - said he decided to invade those four New
York museums for a simple reason.
"I've wandered round a lot of art galleries thinking, 'I could have done
that,' so it seemed only right that I should try," he wrote. "These
galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public
never has any real say in what art they see."
He said he had entered all of the museums during normal visitors' hours.
Asked how he was able to hang his works without being noticed by museum
guards or security cameras, Banksy responded rather opaquely. "You just have
to glue on a fake beard and move with the times," he said.
He added that he had thought about storming the Guggenheim, but was too
intimidated. "I would have had to appear between two Picassos," he wrote.
"And I'm not good enough to get away with that."
Rod
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