If you read nothing else today, don’t miss Wooster’s post on Banky’s escapades in New York. The New York Times article is full of the condescending elitism you’d expect, but Banksy’s succinct explanation on Wooster is perfect:

Were the works you installed all paintings on canvas?
Two of the works were fine oil paintings. I vandalised them so they had some actual meaning. In the Natural History museum I installed a real dead beetle but with model missiles and satellite dishes stuck to it. A bug in the true American spirit […].
What message, if any, were you trying to convey by putting up these works?
I’ve wandered round a lot of art galleries thinking ‘I could have done that’ so it seemed only right that I should try.
These Galleries are just trophy cabinets for a handful of millionaires. The public never has any real say in what art they see. Its good to screw with the selection process sometimes. ‘Comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable’ as Eleanor Roosevelt once said.
The gas mask painting is about how fear of terror is disfiguring society.
The military officer painting is dedicated to all those who joined the forces to fight honorable and just wars, and ended up feeling like maybe they should have stayed home and been peace activists instead.

Read the whole thing here, and the original entry here.