A tipster writes "I saw the elusive Banksy doing a stencil on the corner of Bleecker and Sullivan last night. Its on the side of Thunder Jacksons." Can anybody confirm this (and whether it is, in fact, from Banksy or just some random guy)? Send a pic to tips@gawker.com and win my appreciation! [Further description: "He looks like a guy you would see in the cheap seats at a soccer game...He did come in and have a couple beers at Thunder Jackson's afterwards but he doesn't like to chat."]

No matter how you feel about the British stencil artist Banksy, you have to admit one thing: his stuff sells for a lot of money. His works have been going for over half a million dollars lately. A homeowner in the UK with a Banksy mural on the side of her house decided to simply sell the mural through an art gallery, and throw in the home for free. But one NYC store owner lucky enough to have a Banksy piece on his building (pictured) was either too ignorant, or too stubborn to take advantage of it. Yes: he painted over it. I hope he loved his momentarily whitewashed wall, because it cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. The kind of funny, and kind of painful pictures [via SuperTouch] of the man in the revenue-destroying act, after the jump. Ouch.

Last week we showed you the supremely artistic "Darth Vader Meets Murakami" work of the anonymous vandal whose canvas is poster advertisements in the New York subways. But as impressed as we were by that, new photos—purportedly by the same vandal—have surfaced that, conceptually, make the earlier work look like a quickie plaything. This anonymous person has messages. All with only the ad posters themselves to work with. We're told these are all genuine, and not Photoshopped. Well, anonymous vandal: You are really fucking good. The six new photos [via And I Am Not Lying], after the jump.

If you're going to be in the Hong Kong area next week, here's something for you to do: stop by the Fabrik Gallery and see the art exhibition from guerilla stencil artist Banksy. Why do I tell you this? Just to segue into this point: Banksy is good! So suck on that, all previously stated Gawker evaluations of the man and his work! Okay, we all have opinions. After the jump, a few examples of Banksy's art that you could buy at this show, if you were quite wealthy. Despite earlier protestations to the contrary, these do not suck.

Above: the February 15 cover of staid journal Science, showing the structure of the ion clouds around the NH3-HCl hydrogen bond; the February 29 cover, showing atoms trapped in a lattice of optical microtraps; and the March 7 cover, a photo of a spray-painted flower, the work of insufferable British graffitti art-prankster Banksy. A reader reports: "I got my mail today to see what is clearly a piece of Banksy art on the front of Science, and I exclaim to my roommates, 'what the fuck is Banksy doing on the cover?!' When my roommates starting asking 'What does his lab study?', I realized that I was going to have to bring this to the attention of someone else." Click to see the incongruous cover lineup in full.

"Art" is just another headline-filler word for "amazing." At least for children, who are the future, and geeks, who are the new trendsetter-influencer-coolhunters. Since K-12 art education is virtually dead, and no one reads books, these heavy Internet users have no preconceptions of art and they don't follow that world's big names. A new Cy Twombly or Lucien Freud painting won't get attention on Digg (Chris Ofili maybe, for the controversy), but a painted Lamborghini is one of the social news site's all-time favorite "art" posts. But it's not all bad. The Diggbrow movement isn't destroying art any more than the Dadaists or post-modernists did; it's reinventing it.

Banksy, the Bristol-born graffiti artist, has a show opening December 2nd at the Vanina Holasek Gallery in Chelsea. If you've been to Angelina Jolie's rumpus room recently you might have seen his work hanging on her wall (she bought one of his paintings at his LA show) or you might have bought one of his books at Urban Outfitters. Either way, you must have been struck by all the issues he raises in his work like...um...um....who the fuck pays £200,000 for spraypaint-and-slogan sophomoric crap? (To be fair, it did feature a white family having a picnic and African orphans, two things the Jolie-Pitt household loves.) But Banksy's art isn't just issue-based, it's also a god investment, as per a press release for the show: "His art has escalated in value faster than pretty much any substance known to man." Also, "Banksy images are even being used to sell 900k condos in Williamsburg." Suck on that, Andy Warhol!

You read Us Weekly for the articles. You can't help but be interested in what Lindsay Lohan snorted, ran her car into or slept with this week. But, you went to college, you read the new Chabons and Lethems as soon as they come out! You're not a vapid person! Good news: Celebrity is not only a major driver of the economy, it's a subject worthy of academic scrutiny. University of Southern California professor Elizabeth Currid, PhD., explains the sociology of fame and pop culture.

Until now, Brad Pitt's favorite graffiti artist Banksy was known only through his tongue-in-cheek stunts and his vaguely anti-establishment stencils. Thanks to some legal gymnastics, Banksy is finally revealed. And surprise! He looks just like an Average Dude. Now this is either good news or bad news. If you like your artists quirky, say like Dali or Kristian Laliberte, that such works as a painted elephant emanated from such a jejune fellow is bound to be disappointing. However, if you're a fan of Jeff Koons and Gerhard Richter and other boring-looking artists, you might find it uplifting that such work flows from such a bland container.

This week's New Yorker carries an excellent Lauren Collins profile of Banksy, the mysterious British graffiti artist/prankster. At the end of the piece, Banksy discusses the difficulty of flying under the radar, and points out an unlikely culprit who's made things more difficult for him:

We didn't attend any of Paris Hilton's multiple launch "parties" for her new album, and then we forced Intern Neel to witness her seated in the ample lap of Mario Lavandeira. However, all is not so cushy for Paris abroad. International graffitist and prankster Banksy punk'd various HMV, Virgin, and other UK record stores by replacing hundreds of copies of Paris's album with his own remixes. Self-important prank video and moderately amusing track sample here, though you can more quickly digest the joke via the remix album art.