Inveterate street art criminal Banksy has been covering London in a steady stream of animaltastic new artworks over the past week, with two more popping up over the weekend and another today (August 12). Saturday (August 10) saw the arrival of cat doing a nice big stretch on a billboard in Cricklewood, Sunday (August 11) we got him making a police box in the City look like a fish tank and today we had a rhino mounting an abandoned car in Charlton.
The big horned beast is the eighth Banksy to appear in the last eight days, following hot on the hooves of an ibex in Kew, some elephants in Chelsea, a handful of monkeys in Shoreditch, a wolf in Peckham and some pelicans in Walthamstow.
Londoners have been busy theorising about what his menagerie of animals could possibly mean, and the Guardian has confirmed that it means…very little. In fact, it’s just meant to be a bit of distraction from how horrible the news is. That’s that clarified.
Could there be more to come? Will tomorrow see the arrival of leopard in Liverpool St? A komodo dragon in Camden? A grouse in Green Lanes? What if it never, ever stops. What if he spends the rest of his life, and our lives, painting a new animal in a different part of town, every single day, forever. What if the only thing that can stop him is nuclear armageddon and then your descendants emerge from the underground safety they’ve lived in for centuries to find he’s done a god damn gibbon on the outside of the bunker?
The world’s most famous street artist has left his mark all over the UK. Here’s a map of where you can find all of his surviving pieces in London and another guide to seeing his art across the country.
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