If you are in Los Angeles this weekend get over to see British street artist Banksy’s newest gallery show entitled Barely Legal. The New York Times published a piece on the show yesterday.

It comes complete with a live elephant painted red and decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis that matches the wallpaper. As Edward Wyatt of the New York Times notes:

As a metaphor for problems that people are uncomfortable talking about, “the elephant in the room” is not the most original. But then, few people actually put the elephant in the room, paint it red and adorn it with gold fleurs-de-lis to match the brocade wallpaper, and then dare viewers not to talk about it.

Banksy’s other stunts include installing four of his works into the the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in broad daylight.

Interestingly, this is not Banksy’s first foray into art involving an elephant. He once snuck into an elephant pen in the London Zoo and bombed the pen from the point of view of the elephant: “I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 10:07 am and is filed under Art, Street Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.