There’s another Jewish spin on Banksy’s street art this week. A Jewish business owner was the lucky recipient of Banksy’s recent bumper art. In drippy red lettering, the back door of a delivery truck in Sunset Park, Brooklyn now reads, “The grumpier you are the more assholes you meet…,” the Orthodox Jewish news site Vos Iz Neias reports.

Israel Lippel, the owner of I&A Merchandise, was at first unaware of his good fortune:

“After Shabbos I got a lot of phone calls,” Israel told VIN News. “I googled Banksy and thought I would just leave the truck where it was until Monday, but a chassidishe guy called me and said ‘you better go move the truck before someone vandalizes it.’”

Lippel told the news site that he was offered $75,000 for the door, an offer he expects to accept, hoping to pay off some debts. But when we spoke, Lippel said he didn’t think that was a serious offer.

“We have other art from juvenile children that doesn’t matter, but if this is the way god wanted to send me some money that’s also good,” Israel told me. “We’re trying to see the best way to sell it. We never got any concrete offers, we are waiting for the right person to come.”

Many of Banksy’s crime scenes have been valued at well over $200,000, but the street artist doesn’t care for the money.

Previous: Banksy Channels Hannah Arendt and Nazis

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Banksy unveiled his latest today: a Nazi injected into an otherwise bucolic landscape painting, comprised of leaves, snowcapped mountains, and a shimmering lake.

Aptly titled, “The banality of the banality of evil,” Banksy explains on his site that he vandalized and then re-donated the painting to the Housing Works thrift store in Gramercy, with one not-so-subtle addition.

Banksy has been really pushing New York City’s envelope lately. Earlier this week, he posted a rejected op-ed that he had submitted to the New York Times, calling the new World Trade Center building an eyesore and a defeat to the terrorists of September 11:

It would be easy to view One World Trade Centre as a betrayal to everyone who lost their lives on September 11th, because it so clearly proclaims the terrorists won. Those 10 men have condemned us to live in a world more mediocre than the one they attacked, rather than be the catalyst for a dazzling new one.

When Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil” to describe the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker in 1963, it created quite the uproar. What do you think of Banksy’s appropriation of Arendt’s famous line? Has Banksy’s edgy, interactive street art gone too far by making light of genocide?

Here’s the trailer for Margarethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” in case you have no idea what the eff me and Banksy are talking about:

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The BFC’s work has naturally built up an often complex, symbiotic dialogue with Haifa. The city provides them with a canvas and has helped launch their careers; they have created their own community here, running music nights, pop-up stores, and opening up a graffiti shop and gallery—FingaPrints, now named Bardo. “We love Haifa: the land, the food,” Unga said. “So, of course the fact that we grew up here and still live and work from here is something that comes out in our work in one way or another. Most of our works aren’t political, probably because Israel is such a politically charged country, that art is kind of our escape to normality.”

Broken Fingaz’s Graffiti Art [Tablet Magazine]

(images from exhibition)

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British “art terrorist” Banksy envisions a society in which art is no longer cloistered away in galleries and private collections, where it’s no longer whored out and sapped of vitality by commercial sponsors. Banksy imagines a city where art is smack in the middle of the public square, challenging citizens to confront injustices in the world around them.

Having first gained fame through his graffiti, Bansky has never given up the anti-elitist approach of his street-art roots. Art is irrelevant hidden away in a museum—to have an impact, it must be visible to a broad cross-section of society. When he’s not stenciling missile-hugging children on the streets of London, Bansky has made a trademark of very publicly sneaking his own work into closed gallery spaces. He’s smuggled paintings into the Tate, the British Museum, and four of the best museums in New York, and in 2004 he installed a dead rat wearing sunglasses in a display case in London’s Natural History Museum.

Taken alone, these pranks might make Banksy little more than the Ashton Kutcher of art. But he applies the same ingenuity and derring-do to his public social commentary around the world. He installed a four-ton statue of a whorish Lady Justice in a park in London to protest the British legal system. He put up four beautiful murals on the Palestinian side of the barrier dividing Israel and Palestine, drawing parallels between the Berlin Wall and Israel’s security fence. His critique of authority ranges from stencils of the Queen as a chimp to a meta-prank in which he put up an official-looking sign declaring a wall a “Licensed Graffiti Area,” inspiring local artists to fill the wall with tags. And while Nike has tried four times to sponsor his work, he’s consistently refused to take money from corporations he thinks are morally suspect.

George Orwell once said that it’s hardest to see the injustices that are right in front of you. Banky’s latest prank gets that message across beautifully: In HMVs across Britian, he’s replaced Paris Hilton’s CD with remixes called “What Have I Done?” and “What Am I For?” The most telling page of his reworked CD insert shows Paris climbing out of a white SUV next to a sleeping homeless man under the ironic legend “90% of Success is just Showing up.” Paris Hilton might seem like an obvious target, but Banky’s critique is spot on: He’s making fun of all of us by pointing out the way we focus on the absurd luxuries afforded to a singing heiress and ignore the social problems lying right at our feet.

Update: Banksy artwork goes up on Ebay and is quickly taken down.

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