By the second day of Banksy's “Barely Legal” exhibition in Los Angeles in 2006, many animal rights activists were registering their displeasure. Banksy was displaying an eight-thousand-pound elephant named Tai, whose hide he had painted red and embellished with gold fleurs-de-lis, to match the wallpaper of a parlor he had constructed. (The elephant in the room, a handout proclaimed, was global poverty.) The activists said that the paint was toxic. Ed Boks, Los Angeles’s general manager of animal services, said he regretted that his office had issued a permit and, after visiting the show, wrote on his blog that looking into the elephant’s eyes “nearly brought me to tears.” He eventually ordered the animal hosed down.
Sources
New Yorker, May 14, 2007, p. 56
