🎯 Banksy 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Banksy (born 1974?, Bristol?, England) is an anonymous British graffiti artist known for his acerbic and antiauthoritarian art, often done in public places. Although he is particularly known for his stenciled art featuring policemen and rats, over the years he has extended his practice to include installation and performance. Banksy’s art often appears unexpectedly, and it typically causes a flurry of media attention. He generally claims the work on social media after it has been spotted. Though Banksy’s identity was well guarded, he came to notice as a freehand graffiti artist in 1993. Using stencils since 2000 to enhance his speed, he developed a distinctive iconography of highly recognizable images, such as rats and policemen, that communicated his antiauthoritarian message. With wry wit and stealth, Banksy merged graffiti art with installation and performance. In the 2003 exhibition “Turf War,” he painted on the bodies of live pigs. At his “Crude Oils” exhibition in London in 2005, which featured altered replicas of the works of Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Edward Hopper, he released 200 live rats in the gallery. In 2005 Banksy, fully disguised, installed his own works on the walls of major museums in New York City and London, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Britain. West Bank murals, “Barely Legal,” and “Cans Festival” In 2005 Banksy also painted a wall on the Palestinian side of the West Bank: on the viewer’s side, children play on a forlorn patch of earth, while through an apparent hole in the wall there is a scene of a perfect tropical beach. Banksy described himself as a “quality vandal,” challenging the authority of political and art institutions on both the right and the left. In September 2006 his one-weekend Los Angeles warehouse installation “Barely Legal,” for which he decorated a live elephant, attracted large crowds despite a lack of publicity. In Bristol, England, in 2006 he depicted a naked man clinging to a windowsill on the side of a public family-planning clinic; local residents voted to keep the mural. In 2008 Banksy’s “Cans Festival”—a play on the Cannes film festival—encouraged visitors to add their own art to a south London rail tunnel on which he and 40 international artists had done airbrush paintings. The following year he staged a surprise show at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol. It featured animatronics, oil paintings, and an old ice-cream truck. Exit Through the Gift Shop and books Banksy’s books—which included Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall (2001), Existencilism (2002), and Wall and Piece (2005)—documented his projects; iconic examples of his work, including a life-size image of two policemen kissing, were featured in the bleak futuristic film Children of Men (2006). Banksy directed the 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary that ostensibly profiled the lives and work of the world’s most talented graffiti artists. Critics were divided on the film, though, as some chose to accept it at face value while others saw it as a satire, with documentary subject and filmmaker-turned-street artist Thierry Guetta (who, some theorized, was an actor paid by Banksy or was, perhaps, Banksy himself) serving as a commentator on the commercialization of art. #Banksy