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Monday, October 02, 2006

Culture: Banksy Punks Paris Hilton

Hundreds of Paris Hilton albums have been tampered with in the latest stunt by "guerrilla artist" Banksy.

Banksy has replaced Hilton's CD with his own remixes and given them titles such as "Why am I Famous?", "What Have I Done?" and "What Am I For?"

He has also changed pictures of her on the CD sleeve to show the US socialite topless and with a dog's head.

A spokeswoman for Banksy said he had doctored 500 copies of her debut album Paris in 48 record shops across the UK.

She told the BBC News website: "He switched the CDs in store, so he took the old ones out and put his version in."

But he left the original barcode so people could buy the CD without realising it had been interfered with.

Banksy is an grafiti artist notorious for his secretive and subversive stunts such as sneaking doctored versions of classic paintings into major art galleries.

The following posting on YouTube shows you how the kaper was done...not that I suggest you should go out and do such subversion, too.



No customers had complained or returned a doctored version.

via BBC

3 comments:

my name is meg. said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
my name is meg. said...

so what's the difference when a geico commercial is satirized on snl or a sony bravia commercial is mashed through a video game simulation?

we all argue the relevance of our content being integrated into pop culture - good or bad. why can't she?

AKI SYSTEMS 2600 said...

i'm sure Paris liked being punked. the fact that she is selected to be satirized, over say, pregnant Britney elevates her as the center of the party. i'd say the "consumer" is more the object of this gag...particularly as these 500 neanderthal purchasers seemed not to notice the difference (it's all trash to them, i guess), and/or preferred the punked version to the "real" version afterall.

also encouraging is the fact that the label and retailer can take a damn joke. there was a time when this kind of thing got a young prankster sued and lawmakers would get up in arms.

what's life if we can't subvert some of our favorite trash?