Cattelan’s famous taped banana stolen from French museum

A museum in eastern France has filed a police complaint after a banana forming the centrepiece of Maurizio Cattelan’s multimillion-dollar conceptual artwork "Comedian" was stolen from an exhibition.


Issued on: 02/06/2026 - RFI

HOW IS IT THAT THE BANANA IS ALWAYS FRESH?STRANGE THAT!

People look at Italian visual artist Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped Banana entitled "Comedian," during a press preview at Sotheby's in New York, on 25 October 2024. AFP - TIMOTHY A. CLARY

The Pompidou-Metz museum, a branch of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, said the banana, famously taped to a wall as part of the Italian artist’s provocative work, was noticed missing by a guard on Saturday.

The museum reported the theft to police on Sunday and said it had lodged a criminal complaint against persons unknown.

The banana has since been replaced, in keeping with the artwork’s unusual maintenance routine: the perishable fruit at the heart of Comedian is changed every three days to keep the work fresh - literally - and in line with its playful challenge to ideas of artistic value.

'French Banksy' and Daft Punk star turn Pont Neuf into Alpine cave




A fruit with a history

This is not the first time Cattelan’s banana has proved too tempting to leave untouched.

In July last year, a visitor to the Pompidou-Metz ate the fruit while it was on display. Guards intervened quickly and a replacement banana was taped to the wall. On that occasion, the museum chose not to take legal action.

Cattelan responded with characteristic mischief, saying he was disappointed the hungry visitor had eaten only the banana and not the tape as well.

This time, however, the museum said it had decided to file a criminal complaint because the perpetrator had not been identified, leaving “no possibility of dialogue”.

It also said the incident raised an issue of respect for the artwork, particularly as it was “the second time this has happened”.

Cattelan’s Comedian has sparked debate, disbelief and fascination since its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, where it was offered for sale with an asking price of $120,000. The work whihc consists of a banana fixed to a wall with duct tape, quickly became one of the most talked-about pieces in contemporary art, in part because of its simplicity and in part because of the questions it raised about authorship, money, performance and the art market itself.

Its notoriety only grew when performance artist David Datuna ate the banana at the 2019 fair, saying he felt “hungry”. Rather than bringing the story to an end, the act helped cement Comedian’s place as a cheerful provocation in the art world – a work that seems to invite both serious debate and comic interruption.

Four charged with theft of gold toilet from English stately home
Value keeps rising

Despite – or perhaps because of – its repeated encounters with hungry visitors and would-be participants, Comedian has continued to climb in value.

In 2024, Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun paid $5.2 million for one iteration of the artwork. Days later, he ate the banana in front of cameras in Hong Kong, turning the purchase into another performance around value, ownership and spectacle.

The work’s physical banana is replaceable, but the concept, certificate and instructions behind it are what collectors buy. That distinction has made Comedian a striking example of how contemporary art can exist as an idea as much as an object and how even a piece of fruit can become a global cultural talking point.

Cattelan, one of Italy’s best-known contemporary artists, has long specialised in works that mix humour, provocation and institutional critique. Alongside Comedian, he is known for America, an 18-carat, fully functioning gold toilet that was once offered to Donald Trump during his first term in the White House.
A fully functioning solid gold toilet, made by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, is going into public use at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on 15 September 2016. AFP - WILLIAM EDWARDS


That work also became the subject of a high-profile theft. In March, a British court found two men guilty of stealing the golden toilet during an exhibition in the United Kingdom in 2020. It had been installed at Blenheim Palace, the 18th-century stately home where wartime prime minister Winston Churchill was born.

The toilet was later broken up, and none of the gold was recovered.

For the Pompidou-Metz, the latest disappearance of Cattelan’s banana is more than a prank. By going to police, the museum has drawn a line between playful engagement with a famously mischievous artwork and the unauthorised removal of part of an exhibited piece.

(With newswires)

 

Lenin versus democracy: A reply to critics of ‘Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism’

By Dan La Botz

Published 23 May, 2026

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In “Lenin versus democracy,” Dan La Botz replies to criticisms of his article “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism,” first published in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal on April 25. La Botz’s rejoinder is appearing simultaneously on LINKS and Communis.

La Botz’s original article elicited the following responses: “Saying Goodbye to Lenin? A Response” by Paul Le Blanc, published in Communis and LINKS on April 30; “Lenin, democracy and the anti-Leninist shortcut” by Anthony Teso, published in LINKS on May 1; and “The Rise and Fall of ‘Leninism’” by John Marot published in LINKS and Communis on May 8.

I am pleased and thankful to see that Paul Le Blanc, Anthony Teso and John Marot took the time to critically engage with my essay, “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism.” Leftists often have an uncritical fixation on Vladimir Lenin’s role. Moreover, the notion that his theories are a model for the left is a serious problem. So, I am glad these three well-informed socialist comrades have engaged in this debate. All three are knowledgeable about the issues and make some interesting points. However, I disagree with their views and methods.

Toward the start of my essay, I listed eleven different moments at which I believe Lenin made decisions that separated him from the tradition of Marxism and democratic socialism. I saw Lenin’s decisions as both a pattern and a cumulative process, each one making possible the next bad decision. To remind readers, these are what I saw as Lenin’s key political decisions:

• The organization of the Bolshevik faction, which later became the Bolshevik Party, and then the Russian Communist Party;
• The organization and execution of the Bolshevik coup, which detonated the October 1917 Russian Revolution;
• The shutting down of the democratically elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918;
• The establishment of a Bolshevik-led coalition Soviet government, which soon became simply a Bolshevik government;
• The establishment of “one-man management” in Soviet industry;
• The establishment of a political police, the Cheka, and unleashing of the Red Terror;
• The establishment of War Communism and militarization of society to win the Civil War;
• Russia’s war on Poland, which ended in defeat;
• The crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion;
• The banning of factions in the Communist Party; and
• Lenin’s empowerment of Joseph Stalin.

My argument is that Lenin’s decisions proved incapable of defending and advancing a democratic socialist revolution — in fact, they contributed to the frustration and failure of the revolution, the results of which we are all familiar with. Yes, the objective conditions were terrible, oppressive, practically overwhelming, etc. But even within that context, the question remains: were there no alternatives to Lenin’s strategic decisions? Might other approaches have led to different outcomes? There is no guarantee, of course; but they might have. So, the question deserves discussion.

Paul Le Blanc

I will take the essays up in the order they came to my attention, starting with Paul Le Blanc’s piece, “Saying goodbye to Lenin?” Paul is a Lenin scholar who has read just about everything there is to read about Lenin and has at hand a wealth of information and an abundance of quotations. He devotes much of his essay to refuting my claim that Lenin was an authoritarian or, as I wrote, that “Lenin’s conception of the party was from the beginning authoritarian, and as the man who dominated the party’s leadership, he was the ultimate authority.”

To refute my claim, Paul quotes people from all social classes, walks of life and political stripes. Here are a few examples of what Paul writes:

According to so sharp a political opponent as the prominent Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch, who knew him personally and spent time visiting with him and his companion Nadezhda Krupskaya in their 1916 Swiss exile, “it is difficult to conceive of a simpler, kinder and more unpretentious person than Lenin at home.”...

“I have never met anyone who could laugh so infectiously as Vladimir Ilyich,” commented Maxim Gorky. “…implacable in his hatred of the capitalist world, could laugh so naively, could laugh to tears, barely able to catch his breath.”

While interesting anecdotes, they do not address my argument. In writing about Lenin’s authoritarianism, I was not talking about his social graces. Lenin may have been a delightful dinner party guest, a wonderful conversationalist and a man who enjoyed a good laugh. But the issue is not his personality; it is his political character and mentality. The question is not whether Lenin was a nice guy in social situations, but whether his political decisions — especially the eleven that I listed — had an authoritarian character and a dangerously anti-democratic impact.

Paul quotes from different documents in which Lenin wrote about the importance of democracy. Lenin often wrote about the significance of democracy but, to put it crudely, talk is cheap. Or as Stalin once said (and others before and after him have said): “Paper will put up with anything that is written on it.” The question is not what Lenin said or wrote, but what he did.

In the eleven cases I gave, he chose an authoritarian position over a democratic one. As a counterexample, had Lenin taken a different approach to politics from the start — one that involved compromise and coalition-building — he might have been able to create a genuine multi-party governing coalition with the several working-class parties in the soviets, an alliance that could have withstood the challenges of the revolution’s first couple of years.

Anthony Teso

In his reply, “Lenin, democracy and the anti-Leninist shortcut,” Teso writes:

La Botz’s argument is weakened by its historical framing. He interprets the revolution’s degeneration primarily as a product of Lenin’s moral failures, largely abstracted from its material context: civil war, foreign invasion, economic collapse, famine, social fragmentation and international isolation. Lenin appears as a moral tragedian rather than an historical actor shaped by objective forces. Such an approach substitutes moral condemnation for historical materialist analysis grounded in concrete conditions.

Teso’s is the classic Trotskyist argument: that the revolution was frustrated and degenerated because of the factors he lists. This argument is not wrong. Those overwhelming factors were tremendously important, and I mentioned all of them in my article. But my question is still: given those factors, what decisions did Lenin and the Bolsheviks make at each turn?

Teso writes, quite rightly: “Revolutions are not mechanical sequences; each Bolshevik decision was shaped by the shifting and coercive pressures of war, famine, sabotage and social disintegration.” I hardly disagree at all with Teso’s explanation, and he agrees with a good deal of my criticism, writing:

Lenin must be criticized rigorously: the ban on factions, the suppression of Kronstadt, one-party rule, the subordination of unions, and the roots of substitutionism, all demand serious reckoning. But that criticism should be conducted from within a Marxist framework, not from the standpoint of a disillusioned liberal democrat startled by the violence and complexity of revolutionary history.

Again, I do not disagree with putting criticism in its historical context. But that history — ruthless and relentless as it was — did not deprive Lenin and the Bolsheviks of their volition.

The situation was complex and a Marxist framework is useful in understanding it. However, I do not believe that war, foreign invasion, a bad harvest and starvation determined Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ behavior. They still exercised free will and made crucial decisions that ultimately determined the revolution’s course. Is it not the case that at each turning point Teso lists, Lenin chose an authoritarian response? And that those decisions accumulated, creating an ever more authoritarian culture, party and regime?

I do disagree strongly with one claim Teso makes, however. He writes: “The Bolsheviks did not secure power solely through manipulation or organizational centralism.” No, not solely. But their organizational centralism and manipulation were fundamental to their methods. The Bolsheviks seized state power without polling the working class and without consulting the other workers’ parties, who were simply informed that parliament had been dispersed and the soviets were now the state. The Bolsheviks also misled the public about the Kronstadt Rebellion they crushed. Centralism and manipulation were key to the Bolshevik revolution.

John Marot

Marot, an incisive historian of the Russian Revolution, turns away from my questions about the decisions Lenin and the Bolsheviks made, arguing we can only understand the issues in terms of “the social-property relations of late Imperial Russia.” In his response to my article, “The rise and fall of ‘Leninism’,” Marot writes:

We cannot ignore the constraints and opportunities for historic action that the Bolshevik Party, the peasantry, the proletariat, and the petty bourgeoisie faced after the destruction of the landed aristocracy and its near-absolutist feudal state.

This is another, more complicated and subtle, version of Teso’s argument: the conditions Russian revolutionaries faced determined the outcome of the revolution. Again, I agree, but the question is still: what did Lenin and the Bolsheviks do, given those “constraints and opportunities”? Marot’s approach, like Teso’s (even if they would disagree about particulars) asks us to look at the big picture, the historic context, to explain and justify Lenin’s decisions.

The largest elements of that bigger picture are Russia’s backwardness, enormous peasantry, reactionary tsarist feudal rulers, and retarded and underdeveloped bourgeoisie. Within that context, Russia’s revolutionaries faced civil war, foreign invasion, harvest failures and starvation, leading to rebellions against the new revolutionary government. Marot writes:

If social-property relations are at all relevant in political matters, as Second International Marxists affirmed, then socialism was not possible in NEP Russia — no matter what policy was pursued. But if socialism was possible had the Bolsheviks adopted “democratic” policies, as Dan La Botz argues in “Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism,” then social-property relations were not an insurmountable obstacle to socialist progress — if there was a democratic will, there was a democratic way. Holding both positions is untenable.

In my essay, I never argued the Russian Revolution could have been saved if Lenin had chosen to fight for more democratic structures. I do not know — and no one can know — if democratic decisions would have opened a democratic path that could have saved the revolution from its terrible destiny.

But let us look at the case Marot raises. He analyzes and justifies Lenin’s dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, chosen by the country’s first democratic election, on the basis that the peasants, who made up the majority of the Russian population, had voted the wrong way and voted for the wrong party. Both the Right (and Left) Social Revolutionaries (SRs) leaders and cadres, Marot tells us, were almost exclusively drawn from “zemstvo [local government] administrative personnel: surveyors, teachers, nurses, agronomists, veterinarians, lawyers, doctors and other professionals.” The Right SRs opposed distributing land to the peasants and thus became counterrevolutionaries.

One wonders if, rather than dispersing the assembly, Lenin and the Bolsheviks — who, after all, had 25% of the Constituent Assembly and a majority in the soviets — could have carried out a campaign in the assembly, the soviets and in society to win over the peasant majority to the Bolshevik’s Land Decree, which abolished private land ownership, confiscated without compensation land from the nobility, church and monasteries, and authorized its redistribution among the peasantry? Instead, the Bolsheviks used force to disperse the assembly and proclaimed the rule of the soviets, which they dominated.

Peasants seized and distributed land, though a few years later, amid the civil war, the Bolsheviks organized grain seizures for the army and the cities. Then, as Marot explains, in just over a decade, “Twenty-five million peasant households were forcibly transformed into a few thousand collective farms, the kolkhoz.” Peasants no longer owned their land and had no right. Was Lenin’s path really the only option?

Le Blanc, Teso, and Marot are all correct to argue that one must look at the larger historical context. Karl Marx wrote in his famous pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

On the basis of those circumstances, men and women nevertheless do make decisions, and there are usually alternatives that could have been chosen.

My view is that full socialism was impossible in Russia in 1920, but different decisions could have led to a democratic state, one that in the future could have led to a socialist society. And yet Lenin tended to choose the alternative that kept power in his hands, increasing the Bolsheviks’ control over events while rejecting other more democratic options. Would the revolution have been saved if Lenin had made more democratic decisions? We will never know. But we do know that the decisions he made piled up until finally leading to the bureaucratic collectivist, totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union.

Let me end with the same words I ended my original essay with:

One does not need Lenin to be a socialist or a revolutionary. One does not need Lenin to create a socialist organization. One needs only socialist principles, democratic discussion and members’ commitment and self-discipline. Our socialist organizations must be genuinely and thoroughly democratic, including in their relations with the labor and social movements. Democracy is at the heart of our socialism. Luxemburg was right: there is no socialism without democracy, and no democracy without socialism.

Dan La Botz is editor of New Politics. You can find out more about La Botz and his writings at danlabotzwritings.com

‘French Banksy’ and Daft Punk star turn Paris bridge into Alpine cave

By AFP
May 21, 2026


'Incredible': the work transforms the Pont Neuf in Paris into a wild cave mountain - Copyright AFP SIMON WOHLFAHRT

Tourists and Parisians goggled at the sight of the French capital’s oldest bridge transformed into a giant “cave” on Thursday, a spectacular new public work by the street artist JR.

JR, dubbed the “French Banksy” after the British street artist, has wrapped the Pont Neuf in fabric painted white, grey and black to create the impression of a rocky grotto.

The creation, 120 metres (390 feet) long, 20 metres wide and varying in height from 12 to 18 metres, drew curious onlookers to the banks of the Seine on a sunny spring morning.

“It really stands out,” 37-year-old Parisian Stephanie Da Cruz told AFP.

“You imagine mountains, the Alps or something like that, and contrasts so strongly with the architecture of Paris, that it’s just very surprising.”

JR, who began his career as a street Paris graffiti tagger and has become one of the best known figures on the French art scene, created the work as a tribute to the duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

They wrapped the Pont Neuf in fabric in 1985, drawing millions of visitors, as well as the Arc de Triomphe in 2021.

“It’s incredible,” passer-by Caroline Masson told AFP.

“People used to tell me about Christo’s project on Pont Neuf, so I never imagined I’d see as an adult the wrapping of the Pont Neuf by JR… it’s spectacular!”



– Mixing the wild and the elegant –



From June 6 to 28, visitors will be able to explore inside the new work, with electro artist Thomas Bangalter — one half of legendary French dance act Daft Punk — providing the soundtrack.

JR said he wanted to “juxtapose the rough and the wild with the refined elegance of Paris, creating a dialogue between the past and the present.

“There is also a kind of unknown, of fear, of entering into a cave — and at the same time, a fascination,” he told AFP.

Organisers are expecting to draw big crowds, particularly foreign tourists, with some of the city’s major attractions including Notre Dame cathedral just a stone’s throw away.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it? The way Paris plays with the city is extraordinary, in my opinion,” Canadian tourist Peter Stuart said.

The work, titled “La Caverne” (The Cave) in French, is the latest in a series of large-scale public art pieces to grace Paris, and even appeared to be winning round the sceptics.

“I’m not a fan of contemporary art. I love Paris as it is, beautiful,” tourist Vince, 75, from New York, told AFP.

“But I must admit it’s fascinating. When I see it like that, I like it… it’s like a little bit of the Alps in Paris.”

‘The Creep State Is Watching’: Guerilla Art Project Takes on Big Tech’s Power Grab​

“These people and these companies need to continue to be exposed for all of the harm that they’re causing and the real power that they have over our government and those governed,” one organizer said.


Posters of Elon Musk and Bill Gates are seen in Seattle.
(Photo via Creep State)

Olivia Rosane
May 05, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

On their way to attend the Met Gala on Monday night, guests might have spotted a different image of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos than the one he tried to project by chairing the annual fundraiser: a poster featuring his bulbous head, looming over them out of the darkness, attached to a muscular spider-shaped body. Above it, a mysterious message: “The Creep State is watching.”

What does it mean?

The Creep State is an anonymous guerilla art and protest project that debuted in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest earlier this year. It is designed to draw people’s attention to the threat posed by Big Tech billionaires and their increasing influence over both the US government and the daily lives of everyone who interacts with their products.

“These individuals are a danger to all of us,” a DC-based organizer said.

What Is the Creep State?

The Creep State image of Jeff Bezos is shown. (Photo via Creep State)

The idea for the Creep State came from the desire to raise awareness about certain Silicon Valley oligarchs and their anti-democratic actions and aspirations. Participants in the project who spoke to Common Dreams asked to remain anonymous in keeping with the guerilla-style tactics of their effort.

“There’s what is really a very small group of men who control these algorithms, who control the software, the hardware, and.. they are trying to initially infiltrate our government and eventually replace our government,” a Seattle-based organizer explained. “They’ve all been pretty clear about, you know, some version of, you know, a company town run by a CEO king.”

The project’s designers wanted to convey that “these specific individuals have very nefarious and creepy goals, and they are personally creeps,”—hence, the “creep state” framing.

“Whatever you do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, believe, dream, the Creep State is watching.”

Currently, the project consists of a physical and digital element.

Volunteers wheatpaste posters of seven Silicon Valley kingpins—Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Marc Andreessen, drawn in cartoon style as B-movie monsters—in major US cities. To date, the images have been displayed in Austin, Seattle, DC, Palo Alto, the area around the Met Gala in New York, and Los Angeles, with more to come.

The posters include a QR code that leads to a website, including a video highlighting how these moguls’ companies and products are already monitoring people’s daily activities, from surveillance pricing to sleep tracking.

“Whatever you do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, believe, dream, the Creep State is watching,” the video declares, before concluding: “We’re fighting back.”


“These people and these companies need to continue to be exposed for all of the harm that they’re causing and the real power that they have over our government and those governed,” the DC-based organizer said.

‘People Versus the Machines

The Creep State image of Sam Altman is shown. (Photo via Creep State)

While there have been many different campaigns and critiques calling out Big Tech and the rise of AI in recent years, the creators of the Creep State took an artistic approach partly to grab people’s attention, to make something that “quite literally visually shocked people out of the normal way that they think about and talk about these guys,” as the Seattle-based organizer put it.

They added that they wanted a viewer’s first response upon seeing the art to be, “Woah!”

So far, it seems to be working.

When the art went up in Seattle ahead of the No Kings protest on March 28, “people walking by stopped and took pictures and were like, ‘Whoa, what is this about? Oh my God, is that Jeff Bezos? Whoa, is that Bill Gates?’” the Seattle organizer said.

A member of the team who put the posters up in DC on April 18 similarly recalled: “We had a young woman come up to us and ask us about the Creep State and said she was glad we were exposing these guys. She said she was from [Prince George’s] County in Maryland and was part of the movement to stop data centers there.”

“Fundamentally the question that we face is will we allow one or a few of these corporations to literally remake our society?”

The project’s designers see themselves as operating within a tradition of guerilla art against the powerful from Banksy, Favianna Rodriguez, and Shepard Fairey’s OBEY posters to student protests against Slobodan Milošević in Serbia in the 1990s and the FeesMustFall campaign in South Africa in the 2010s. However, the project—which made a point of working with actual human creators, including a screenwriter, comic book artist, and graphic designer—takes on extra resonance in an age in which AI slop clogs up social media feeds and threatens to put creative workers out of a job.

“This is very much a people versus the machines kind of thing,” the Seattle-based organizer said. “Are we going to be a society where human creativity and human inspiration and human thinking are valued, or are we going to be a world where.. we’re all plugged into a screen?”

Bipartisan Appeal

The Creep State image of Peter Thiel is shown. (Photo via Creep State)

As the project uses an artistic approach to hook people who might otherwise ignore its messaging, it also crafts that messaging in an attempt to appeal to people who might not always agree politically.

The name “Creep State” was chosen in part for its similarity to “deep state,” which is often used on the political right to describe hidden actors undemocratically controlling the federal government. Some of the headlines highlighted in the introductory video were also selected to appeal to right-leaning viewers. (“Prayer apps: is AI playing God?” one reads.)

“Our assessment here is that we may have, and we very much do have, some very deep disagreements in a variety of ways with the right wing. But there is a very real grassroots right-wing opposition to the Silicon Valley takeover of our economy and our democracy. And we want to make sure that this is a campaign that different types of folks can see themselves reflected in,” the Seattle-based organizer said.

“Once they’re burrowed in, it’s going to be very difficult to root them out.”

Indeed, the rise of AI and the hyperscale data centers it relies on seems to have, at least so far, bypassed the usual culture war divides. As communities across the country have mobilized against the data center buildout, “you’ve got DSA people linking arms with, you know, like ultra-MAGA folks,” the Seattle organizer added.

The numbers reflect this, with around 50% of both Republicans and Democrats now saying they are more concerned than excited about AI and 55% of the politicians opposing data centers, which are often located in red states, being Republicans.

The embrace of AI and its Silicon Valley pushers may be one wedge between President Donald Trump and some of his supporters, as 75% of 2024 Trump voters think that AI should be regulated while the president himself has thrown his weight behind a plan to prohibit states from regulating AI at all.

Indeed, even as the Creep State’s developers reach out to Trump voters, they are clear that the Trump administration itself has escalated the Big Tech takeover of the US government, upping the urgency of their project.

Even before Trump was elected a second time around, Silicon Valley enabled his rise. Bezos sunk The Washington Post’s endorsement of his rival Kamala Harris, while Musk donated more than a quarter billion to back Trump’s campaign. His Vice President JD Vance is a protege of Thiel, who has backed Trump since 2016.

Trump has repaid these Big Tech executives handsomely with access, money, and his deregulatory push. The DC-based organizer said they were partly inspired to get involved with the Creep State project after witnessing the havoc wreaked by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which cut funding for essential grants and may lead to the deaths of over 14 million through the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development. At the same time, tech billionaires have increased their profits by contracting with the government, enabling deportations via Immigration and Customs Enforcement and both surveillance and targeting via the Pentagon.

Yet the Seattle-based organizer said that some Trump supporters “are beginning to realize… that these guys don’t care about Trump. Trump is a vehicle for them. And, you know, once they’re burrowed in, it’s going to be very difficult to root them out.”

‘We’re Fighting Back’

The Creep State image of Mark Zuckerberg is shown. (Photo via Creep State)

Ultimately the goal of the Creep State project is to plug everyone who sees and responds to the art—whatever their politics—into the growing movement to push back against the Big Tech power grab.

“The more we can expose these actors, it can inspire people to… organize against them, demand… oversight and regulations over AI and the influence that these individuals have on their politics,” the DC-based organizer said.

People who scan the QR code can be funneled into future wheatpasting sessions (which are all volunteer efforts) or local fights related to tech policy. One hope the organizers have is that communities across the country who are fighting data center construction or Flock camera expansion could order posters from the site that would have their QR codes adjusted to direct viewers to the local struggle.

“If we can plug people into some of those fights with organizations and for them to get more deeply involved, we’d love to do that,” the DC organizer said.

The Seattle organizer concluded, “Fundamentally the question that we face is will we allow one or a few of these corporations to literally remake our society?”

They continued: “We’re all living through this polycrisis. The climate is collapsing, the economy is in tatters, we’re at war abroad. There’s something new and crazy every day, and it’s hard to break through to people. So the hope is that this art specifically, in this way of highlighting both the like political creepiness and the personal creepiness of these guys, can maybe shock some people who otherwise are just trying to get through their day into, ‘I need to do something.’”

A Four-Word Response for Those Upset With Jeff Bezos for Any Number of Reasons: ‘Tax the Damn Rich’

Sen. Bernie Sanders noted that the billionaire spent $10 million on the Met Gala, $120 million on a penthouse, and $500 million on a yacht while “planning to throw 600,000 Amazon workers out on the streets and replace them with robots.”


Protesters gather blocks away from where the Met Gala is being held in Manhattan on May 4, 2026 in New York City.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
May 05, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in recent weeks has come under fire for a wide variety of reasons, including his involvement with the 2026 Met Gala and his plans to build a robot workforce.

A Monday report from The Hollywood Reporter noted that Bezos, despite being a lead sponsor of this year’s Met Gala, did not make an appearance at the event’s red carpet as he had in past years.

Bezos’ sponsorship of the Gala has been hit with heavy criticism in recent weeks, as many activists slammed the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art for taking the tech mogul’s money despite his company’s labor practices and reported involvement in helping US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, other critics “accused the billionaire of buying influence with the major event and speculation swirled that some stars may boycott the event due to his involvement.”

In addition to not appearing at the Met Gala red carpet, Bezos is reportedly trying to lower his profile by selling his $500 million luxury yacht.

The New York Post reported on Monday that Bezos has decided that the 417-foot vessel has become “too recognizable,” and is also a headache to maintain, costing an estimated $30 million per year to operate.

‘Worst Conceivable Representative’: Inequality Opponents Condemn Bezos Sponsorship of Met Gala

“It’s a thin line between celebrating glamor and artwashing extreme wealth,” said the Tax Justice Network.


A person puts up “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala” posters in New York City on April 15, 2026.
(Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
May 04, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

As celebrities prepared to attend the 2026 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Monday, a coalition of nearly three dozen civil society groups warned that with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—currently the fourth-richest person on Earth—chairing the annual fundraiser, the gala risks “artwashing the harms of extreme wealth.”

Groups including Greenpeace International, Patriotic Millionaires, and War on Want signed a letter organized by the Tax the Superrich Alliance, calling on the museum and Vogue magazine, which hosts the event, not to honor Bezos and warning that the billionaire is using the two cultural institutions as tools “to launder his public image.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a celebrated collection of art spanning centuries, many of it made “in defiance of power—work that exposed injustice, gave voice to the silenced, and held the powerful to account,” reads the letter.

But the tech mogul chosen to chair the gala “has made his loyalties clear” since President Donald Trump first took office in 2017 and during the Republican’s second term, said the groups, pointing to Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post, the mass firing of hundreds of the newspaper’s reporters this year, and his remaking of the publication’s opinion section into one focusing on “free markets.”

He “gutted” the Post “while reportedly pouring $75 million into a film promoting Melania Trump,” reads the letter, referring to the Amazon-produced documentary film Melania.

“A 2% wealth tax on just three necklaces previously worn by celebrities to the Met Gala’s red carpet could fully fund New York City’s home energy assistance program, helping 1 million households heat and cool their homes.”

“He is not just a bystander to Trump’s administration,” wrote the organizations. “He is one of its enablers. This is not philanthropy. This effectively is influence bought and paid for by Bezos’ pocket change—and the Met Gala is his latest purchase.”

The groups added that in addition to aligning himself with the White House through his ownership of the Post, Bezos and Amazon—a government contractor where he is still the largest individual shareholder—is working with Trump to “make possible a concentration of power that not only threatens lives in the US but across the world as well.”

“While so many of these policies aren’t new, they have been exacerbated under Trump and with the help of people like Bezos—from families torn apart by ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids reportedly enabled by Amazon’s own technology, to a White House emboldened to threaten and carry out military action against sovereign nations without consequence—including to ‘destroy a whole civilization’ in Iran—with no accountability,” reads the letter.

The Tax Justice Network, one of the signatories, emphasized that just a fraction of the money that goes to the $100,000-per ticket Met Gala could alleviate the economic inequality that’s grown worse under the Trump administration.

“A 2% wealth tax on just three necklaces previously worn by celebrities to the Met Gala’s red carpet could fully fund New York City’s home energy assistance program, helping 1 million households heat and cool their homes,” said the Tax Justice Network, citing its analysis released Monday.

Bezos is among the billionaires who have contributed donations to Trump’s pet projects—a luxury ballroom and a 250-foot-tall arch in Washington, DC—while the president has tried to cut the home energy assistance program, said the group.

“There’s a thin line between celebrating glamorous fashion and artwashing extreme wealth, and that line gets bulldozed when your poster boy is an ICE-profiteering billionaire bankrolling Trump’s vanity projects and a top spender on anti-worker lobbying,” said Alex Cobham, chief executive at the Tax Justice Network.

In the first two hours of the Met Gala, Cobham added, “Bezos’s wealth will grow by the equivalent of 130,000 hours of a teacher’s labor... This extreme distortion throws economies out of whack. Our economies are supposed to let people earn the wealth they need to lead secure and comfortable lives, but most countries’ tax rules make it easier for the superrich to collect wealth than for the rest of us to earn it.”

“In Bezos’ case, it’s easy to see how that undertaxed collected wealth goes towards lobbying further against workers’ rights and pay, while his company Amazon remains one of the biggest recipients of US subsidies,” said Cobham.

According to the Tax Justice Network’s analysis, Bezos accumulated $3.8 million every house from 2023-25, when his total wealth grew by more than $100 billion.

“If Bezos were to continue to accumulate wealth at this rate,” said the group, “he would accumulate $7.6 million in the first two hours of the Met Gala event, which is the equivalent of 110 NYC Public Schools teachers’ starting salaries”—$68,902.

Those organizing the gala can and must “stop celebrating those destroying our countries and humanity itself,” reads the letter sent by the Tax the Superrich Alliance, by not honoring Bezos and backing the fair taxation of the wealthiest households and corporations.

“End the oligarchy,” reads the letter. “Tax the super rich. Now.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a proponent of taxing the rich to pay for crucial public programs and services, planned to skip the Met Gala in a break with tradition. Last month Mamdani announced plans for a tax on second homes valued at $5 million or more in New York City.

Celebrities who are reportedly planning to skip the event include Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid, who has spoken out against ICE and in favor of Palestinian rights, and actress Zendaya.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday argued that Bezos’ lavish spending and his plan to build an army of robots to replace human workers was symbolic of American capitalism in 2026.

“The reality of American life today,” Sanders wrote in a social media post. “Jeff Bezos, worth $290 billion, spent: $10 million on the Met Gala, $120 million on a penthouse, $500 million on a yacht. Meanwhile, he’s planning to throw 600,000 Amazon workers out on the streets and replace them with robots. Unacceptable.”

Warren Gunnels, Sanders’ staff director, similarly made the case that Bezos’ spending spree was yet another argument for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

“Jeff Bezos, who paid $10 million for the Met Gala,” Gunnels wrote, “got $62 billion richer since [President Donald] Trump was elected and spent $500 million on a yacht to sail to his $55 million wedding in Venice to give his wife a $5 million ring because his tax rate is less than 1%. Four words: Tax the damn rich.”

Labor unions, which have long clashed with Bezos over Amazon’s aggressive union-busting tactics, held their own rival “Ball Without Billionaires” on Monday evening to protest the Bezos-funded Met Gala.

As reported by Democracy Now!, the gala featured “Amazon, Whole Foods, Washington Post, Starbucks, and Uber workers” who “walked the runway in looks by immigrant designers.”

April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, said the Ball Without Billionaires was “not just about fashion” but “about power” and “telling the truth that people who sew and care and drive and cook and clean and secure and those that create are the ones who make everything possible.”

Workers at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, who earlier this year voted to unionize, registered their own disapproval of this year’s Met Gala, posting a message on Instagram informing followers that “91% of hourly Met staff in our unit earn less than a living wage.”

‘Worst Conceivable Representative’: Inequality Opponents Condemn Bezos Sponsorship of Met Gala

“It’s a thin line between celebrating glamor and artwashing extreme wealth,” said the Tax Justice Network.

 

Banksy’s true identity revealed? New report claims to unmask world famous street artist

Copyright AP Photo

By David Mouriquand

Published on 17/03/2026 - EURONEWS

The end of decades’ worth of speculation and intrigue? Maybe. A new report claims to have finally unmasked Banksy’s true identity.

The secret behind the world’s most famous street artist's anonymity has been the source of speculation for decades. Now, a new report claims to finally reveal Banksy’s identity.

An in-depth investigation by journalists at Reuters claims to have unmasked the celebrated Bristol-based graffiti artist and highly influential activist.

The report’s “beyond dispute” evidence is based on a trip the artist made to Ukraine in 2022, photographs posted by former associates, and a handwritten confession note from an arrest in New York in 2000.

Drumroll...

According to the report, Banksy is in fact Robin Gunningham, 51, from Bristol - although the investigation states he changed his name to the more common name David Jones some years ago, in order to avoid identification.

However, the artist’s lawyers insist that Banksy’s identity remains a secret.

In response to the Reuters story, Banksy’s lawyer Mark Stephens wrote that his client “does not accept that many of the details contained within [the] enquiry are correct”.

Stephens also said the story “would violate the artist’s privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger”, as “working anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests.”

He added: “It protects freedom of expression by allowing creators to speak truth to power without fear of retaliation, censorship or persecution.”

Reuters concluded that “the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse.”

Banksy's Dove of Peace AP Photo

Related

• Stargazing children: New Banksy unveiled in London in time for Christmas
• Banksy mural of judge beating a protester scrubbed off Royal Courts of Justice in London

One of the most famous artists of our century rose to prominence through a series of graffiti pieces that appeared on buildings across the UK, marked by their satirical and anti-establishment themes.

One of his / her / their most famous works are “Girl With Balloon”, which was at the center of a brilliant stunt in 2018, when a framed copy of the work was shredded after being sold at auction by a mechanical device Banksy had hidden within the frame. Banksy later gave the altered piece the name “Love Is In The Bin”.

Banksy's "Love Is In The Bin" AP Photo

Banksy has produced work in countless locations, including Ukraine and the West Bank, showing his apparent sympathy with the Palestinian cause.

A recent work sprayed on the side of the UK’s Royal Courts of Justice showed a judge beating a protester with a gavel, which some have interpreted as signalling sympathy with pro-Palestinian activists arrested for supporting Palestine Action – a proscribed group in the UK.

A Palestinian labor rests under a mural by Banksy at a gas station in the West Bank city of Bethlehem - 2022 AP Photo

Related

• Banksy’s new artwork temporarily (and naughtily) defaced in France
• Banksy’s real name revealed? Unearthed 2003 interview seems to unveil artist’s identity

Banksy has always chosen to keep his / her / their identity unknown, a way of continue to work without the constraints of fame. It's an anonymity which also served as a means of protection from police prosecution.

There has been much speculation over the years as to who the infamous street artist could be. The theories are numerous. Many believed that Banksy could be Robert del Naja, the founder of Massive Attack, who is also a graffiti artist.

Others theorised that Banksy could be Jamie Hewlett, the co-founder of the band Gorillaz; Neil Buchanan, the host of several children’s art shows on British television, who during the pandemic, was forced to release a statement denying his involvement with the Banksy persona; and the possibility it could be a collective of artists as opposed to a one man band.

Recent speculation included that Banksy could be a collective led by a woman, and three years ago, a lost BBC interview with Banksy resurfaced, seemingly confirming Banksy’s name was actually Robert “Robbie” Banks.

Banksy Brexit mural of a man chipping away at the EU flag in Dover, England AP Photo

Robin Gunningham? Robbie? Robert?

While Reuters is right in saying that the public has a “deep interest” in the artist’s identity, part of the appeal resides in the riddle. Once you solve it, you inadvertently dent the artist’s tantalizing elusiveness and his / her / their sense of unpredictability, as well as endanger his freedom of movement and expression.

Banksy could be anyone, and maybe that's the point. Continued speculation as to who is behind the artwork is for the best.