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Christmas greetings from Banksy
By Tom Teodorczuk, Evening Standard 01.12.06
The distinctly unfestive Father Christmas at Santa's Ghetto in Oxford Street
Banksy's image of Hansel and Gretel featuring Michael Jackson
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Santa rechristened as Satan, holding a placard stating: "It's cancelled" and a Michael Jackson lookalike in a reworked drawing of Hansel and Gretel...
It can only be guerrilla artist Banksy's Santa's Ghetto, an art gallery opening in Oxford Street today.
The gallery showcases a wide range of controversial art including a mocked-up photo of Tony Blair taking pictures on his mobile phone of an explosion in a Middle Eastern desert.
Visible from the pavement, Downing Street is expected to request that the image, designed to protest against the war in Iraq, be taken down.
It is by Peter Kennard, one of Mayor Ken Livingstone's favourite artists, who was appointed to stage an anti-war exhibition at City Hall in 2004. Banksy is exhibiting four works, all of which were snapped up within 10 minutes of going on sale.
One features a man resembling Michael Jackson offering candy to a small boy and girl in a variant on the Brothers Grimm's Hansel and Gretel tale.
The portrait was sold yesterday to an unknown buyer for a sum believed to be £100,000. Ten works have already been sold at the gallery which aims to sell affordable art to the public.
Other artworks include two portraits of Mona Lisa by Nick Walker, in which Leonardo Da Vinci's iconic subject is mocked up as Marge Simpson and with her rear exposed, and Emma Heron's "vendalimb" machine which has a black child with a leg blown off gazing into it.
Also up for sale is a Tube map in which every station is named Error, a teddy bear stabbed with a kitchen knife and a picture of Saddam Hussein in an American military uniform.
Santa's Ghetto will stay open for 23 days and it is the fifth year of Banksy's concept store.
He said through his spokeswoman: "I felt the spirit of Christmas was being lost - it was being increasingly uncommercialised and more and more to do with religion. So we decided to open our own shop and sell pointless stuff you didn't need."
Steve Lazarides, gallery owner and friend of Banksy, said: "I think this is the best Santa's Ghetto so far. It's in Oxford Street, highly political, and there's loads of cheap art to buy. What more could you want?"
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Reader views (2)
Banksy is a marmite genius, even he doesn't take himself seriously but manages to generate views on what he does which is the point of art.
- J, Basingstoke
I wonder what Banksy has to say about the hundreds of thousands of Muslims that Blair saved when he intervened against genocidal dictator Milosevic, or the young girls that are being schooled for the first time in Afghanistan since its liberation from medieval theocracy under the Taliban, or the millions in the third world helped by the dropping of all debts owed by African nations to Britain? He has nothing to say, because Banksy is a cartoon artist whose profoundness is about as long lasting as a McDonalds - stale, processed idiocy.
- Faye Emrick, London
