Now Banksy’s really made it in the art world. He’s been faked.

About a year ago the British tagger artist Banksy made a splash in L.A. that included a show of his work and a spree of spray-painted stencil tags in the usual gritty urban places. I wrote about the pink elephant and rat, two animals that played important roles in his visit. (See blog of 9-23-06.) Just recently, a whistleblower has outed a rat who may represent a pink elephant in the art and eBay scenes.

Banksy has used East London’s POW, Pictures on Walls, to publish prints of his work. Reading their FAQs tells us they are “a loose collection of alcoholics and show-offs,” just the edgy, nasty, anti-social bunch that would appeal to an artist who revels in anti-everything. Banksy’s frequently stenciled rat image signifies society’s outsiders who, looking in, want to expose everything that’s wrong, selfish, greedy, and decadent with our culture. But a whistleblower ratted on POW.

It seems unauthorized prints of Banksy’s work were being illegally and fraudulently sold on eBay, where not only were forged prints listed, but “shill” bids were put in that artificially increased the forgeries’ prices. To protect its buyers from such frauds, eBay’s rules have strong consequences, including account cancellation, forfeiture of fees, and referral to law enforcement. Between 25 and 100 people may have purchased the fake Banksy prints. How embarrassing for POW whose slangy policy says, “The manufacture and sale of prints on POW is in fact an extremely accountable process.” Yeah, right, this from a company that describes their facility as a “shit-hole” selling prints, “direct over the internet without the usual art world sham.”

So who’s the rat, and who’s the elephant here?

Is the “elephant in the room” that no one wants to confront eBay? By writing rules of enforcement about fraud, don’t they reveal there’s a scam problem? Is it the print studio POW who stressed they had been victims as well, yet seem to revel as the get-even outsiders who couldn’t “be embraced by the proper art world?”

And who’s the rat? The whistleblower who exposed the fraud in his or her own studio, or the selfish, greedy employees who made out by picking eBay buyers’ pockets? Or could it be Banksy, symbolized by the ever-vigilant, repugnant rat, whose art, one way or another, is still pointing out “what a horrible place the world its?”