"The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit."
- Banksy
Banksy is without question my favorite living artist, I agree completely with
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city_of_dis to that end. His work is both humorous and incendiary, and he will not be ignored. The best thing about his work is that it is left completely to speak for itself, you absolutely have to concede on this point. In part because it is simply that powerful and in part because no one really knows who he is - he is a graffiti terrorista, really. This is just part of what makes him so brilliant.
Recently, he's made me even more proud than usual. He replaced up to 500 copies of Paris Hilton's debut album,
Paris, in 48 different UK record stores with his own cover art and remixes by Danger Mouse. Music tracks were given titles such as "Why am I Famous?", "What Have I Done?" and "What Am I For?". Several copies of the CD were purchased by the public before stores were able to remove them, some going on to be sold for as much as £750 on online auction websites. The cover art depicted Paris Hilton digitally altered to appear topless. Other pictures feature her with a dog's head replacing her own, and one of her stepping out of a luxury car, edited to include a group of homeless people, which included the caption
90% of success is just showing up. The clever bastard even fixed it so the packaging had the original barcode on it, so unless you were paying attention (unlikely if you'd actually spend money on a Paris Hilton CD) you bought it and had no idea what it really was until you went to unwrap it! Once the stores got hip to it, they yanked all remaining doctored CDs but not before several were purchased. They're selling now on eBay & other auction sites for hundreds of bucks.
( The Pictures: Banksy -vs- Paris Hilton... FOR THE WIN!! )See how it was done:
Get the MP3 from the cd
here. More on Banksy:
