A Parodist Who Calls Himself Hanksy
A Parodist Who Calls Himself Hanksy
By JOHN LELAND
FEB. 14, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/nyregion/a-parodist-who-calls-himself…
The street artist who calls himself Hanksy, on Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan with his piece “Walter Flite.” Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
This is a story about art in the age of social media — about anonymity and self-promotion, about feral cats and viral cat videos.
In April 2011, a law school dropout in Bushwick, Brooklyn, newly arrived from the Midwest, had an idea that he thought might make a splash. He admired the street artist Banksy; he grew up on the movies of Tom Hanks. Why not mash up the two? Using simple computer software, he downloaded a Banksy painting of a rat holding a paint roller, then added an image of Mr. Hanks’s face. The whole thing took 10 or 15 minutes to create. He printed a cutout and pasted it on a wall at Mulberry and Kenmare Streets in Little Italy, signing it Hanksy. It was a stupid pun, he knew, but he was a sucker for stupid puns. Isn’t everybody?
He photographed the wall for his Instagram and Twitter accounts, and emailed it to the Wooster Collective, a popular street art website. Then he went to sleep.
“And then it just went viral,” Hanksy said the other day, speaking in a Lower East Side coffee shop near the restaurant in which he is a partner. “I remember counting at the time that it had been tweeted to four- or five-million accounts.”
