Banksy, International Prankster Supreme

Banksy is Robert Banks (or maybe not), an English master prankster and street artist. His work is part practical joke, part public event, part Monty Python, and part political activism; all aimed against society's rampant commercialism and the manipulations of mass media. Banksy is at the forefront of a new breed of art guerillas known as "culture jammers." Some call "culture jamming" a marriage of Andy Warhol's Factory and Abbie Hoffman's Yippies evolved to the next level.

Here's a selection of Banksy's more infamous escapades:

1) At the London Zoo, he climbed inside the penguin exhibit and painted a seven-foot-high graffiti message: "We're bored of fish."

2) At the Bristol Zoo, he entered the elephant enclosure and painted a longer message: "I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring."

3) In 2005, he went to New York City and snuck his own framed whacko paintings into the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History, and hung them on the museum walls. In MOMA, one of Banksy's paintings spoofed Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. It was a painting of a cheap brand of English tomato soup.

In London, he hung his paintings in the Tate Gallery.

4) Also in 2005, Banksy went to the occupied West Bank and painted images on the Palestinian side of Israel's West Bank Barrier Wall. One image was a ladder going up and over the wall. Another was an image of children digging a hole through the wall. The reactions were mixed on both sides of the Wall. Some Palestinians complained that Banksy's images were "too pretty" and didn't portray the misery of their struggle.

5) In 2006, he culture jammed celebrity heiress Paris Hilton, replacing copies of her debut music CD with his own cover art and Danger Mouse remixes with titles such as "Why am I famous?", "What have I done?", and "What am I for?"