Banksy doesn’t stop anymore, here’s the aquarium in the London Zoo

A school of fish, perhaps piranhas, swimming on the walls of a police sentry box: this is the seventh work of art that Banksy, as he has been doing since last Monday around 1pm London time, has ‘authenticated’ with a post on Instagram. More animals, to enrich the London Zoo scattered throughout the streets of the city that the famous and mysterious British writer inaugurated on August 5 with a goat (or perhaps an ibex) balanced on Kew Bridge, then populating it with two elephants with their trunks touching in Chelsea, three monkeys swinging under a railway bridge in Brick Lane, a wolf howling at the moon on a satellite dish in Peckham, two pelicans eating fish on the sign of a pub in Walthamstow and finally a big black cat stretching in Cricklewood.
Unlike previous black stencils, the aquarium appears to be made with a translucent spray paint that lets shades of blue shine through. But there is no doubt about the authorship, given that the image appeared on Banksy’s official IG profile. This time he left his signature on an old police sentry box on Ludgate Hill, near the Old Bailey and St Paul’s Cathedral. Two City officers took photos of the work: one of them explained that the work was caught on CCTV and he had been asked to go and have a look. “We are aware of damage to a City of London police box on Ludgate Hill,” said Inspector Andy Spooner. “We are working with the City of London Corporation who own the police box.” Along with CCTV and bollards to narrow streets, police sentry boxes like this one – the BBC website recalls – were installed around the Square Mile in the 1990s to protect the city from terrorist attacks during the IRA riots.
If street art is ephemeral by definition, the new works of Banksy’s Zoo – all without titles or captions, to increase their mystery and fuel feverish speculation – have had a different fate: the wolf, with all its parabola, was stolen a few hours after its creation by two hooded men, the goat was put under perspex, the pair of elephants was vandalized with streaks of white paint and the cat was removed a few hours after its appearance, amid whistles from the people who came to see it. The men in charge of the removal explained that they had been “hired” by a construction company for security reasons.
According to newspapers such as the Observer and the Guardian, which contacted the Pest Control Office, the non-profit company created by Banksy to sell and authenticate his works, the new series of works is intended to “cheer up the public” during a particularly tumultuous week in the United Kingdom. “There is a sense,” wrote Vanessa Thorpe in the Guardian, “that Banksy hopes that uplifting works will cheer people up with a moment of unexpected fun, as well as gently highlighting the human capacity for creative play, rather than destruction and negativity.” In any case, according to the Pest Control Office, some theories about the deeper meaning of each new image “have gone too far.” (ANSA).