The image above is entitled "Early Man Goes to Market" by an artist who calls himself Banksy. It is part of the collection of the British Museum and the interesting part of the story is how it came to be part of their collection. Banksy hung it there himself in Gallery 49 accompanied by a few sentences of explanatory text and attributed to "Banksymus Maximus".

The British Museum were completely unaware of this and continued the remain ignorant of their new acquisition until Banksy announced it some time later on his web site. On becoming aware of the existence of the painting the British Museum, being an icon in the preservation of cultures, saw it, correctly, as representative of a sub-culture of the western art movement known as "Art Terrorism" and incorporated it into their permanent collection.

In similar fashion Banksy has smuggled into and hung his work in the big four New York Museums, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Museum. All, as it happens, in a single day. In Museum of Modern Art he hung a painting of a cheap brand of British tomato soup, a send-up of Andy Warhol's iconic can of Campbell's, something that may not have displeased Andy Warhol at all, given the precept of this art.

Like mainstream artists much of his art has a political agenda such as this stencil work which is to be found across Bristol where he lives.

This clearly has a potent message but the major theme of his work is the iconoclasm of the mainstream art institutions. He says

Art's the last of the great cartels. A handful of people make it, a handful buy it, and a handful show it. But the millions of people who go look at it don't have a say.

He once painted a thought bubble on the wall of the elephant pen at the London Zoo: "I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring." The difficulty of that job gained the respect of the graffiti community but, more importantly, it caught the imagination of the public, which was happy to empathize with the elephants.

He says

I always wanted to be a fireman, do something good for the world ... to show that money hasn't crushed the humanity out of everything.

(via Wired)