ABOVE: Detail from Banksy’s Early Man Goes to Market (c. 2005). The mock cave painting, which “art terrorist” Banksy recently placed without permission in the British museum, has been added to the museum’s permanent collection.

Banksy, the pseudonymous UK guerilla artist, is profiled—rather vaguely, for legal reasons—in the latest Wired. How exactly Banksy’s oeuvre fits into Wired’s editorial mandate of breathless technophilic hypery is unclear, but they call what he does “hacking,” so that’s close enough, apparently. Anyway, they note that Banksy’s latest piece, Early Man Goes to Market (above) has been added to the permanent collection of the British Museum, where the artist surreptitiously mounted his anti-consumerist cave painting a while ago.

The profile is kind of unsatisfying, long on amusing anecdotes about Banksy’s stencil grafitti creations (”He once did [insert amusing stencil example A here]. Isn’t that something?”) and short on any new information about the artist, his technique, his choices of subject matter. But there’s a generous collection of images of Banksy creations accompanying the article, in many cases depicting works that have long since been sandblasted away by The Man. We at ADD believe Banksy is a seriously important art figure, and though some scoff at his smart-ass panache, the man has a point to make, and he could be making it at your neighbourhood art gallery at any time.

LINK: Wired > Art Attack