Near the top of this week's news-pile for hipster pop-kids everywhere has been Urban Art-Guerilla Banksy's appropriation of the Paris Hilton album.
In a nutshell, he turned the record-sleeve into an art-statement and (purportedly aided and abetted by none other than Dangermouse) replaced the CD itself with his own version of the musical contents, disseminating 500 copies around the highstreet music-shops of 42 UK towns and cities.

Like a lot of you media-savvy Situation-istas out there, I'm a fan. Of Banksy, not Paris. He combines often stunning imagery with social-comment, wit and irony whilst somehow managing to make the whole thing seem like Fun. You won't find Damian Hirst ticking many of those boxes. I personally anticipate his next offering in the same way I used to look forward to a new Tarantino movie.
So I got to thinking about how difficult it must've been to replace 500 CDs in the record shops of 42 cities, (a mammoth task in itself I'd have thought) without getting pinched by a store-detective at least once. Of course, I reasoned, there must be a small army of merry pranksters in his employ etc etc. Nevertheless, guerilla-tactics is half the story with this kind of thing, right?
Then I went to Ebay.

At the time of writing, the minimum price that one of these CDs is fetching hovers nervously around the £600 mark.
How great it would be, I mused, to be one of the relatively few punters to stumble across one, or more, of these in their local HMV/Virgin.
Then it occurred to me - could it be that only some, or who knows, maybe none of these items ended up in record shops at all... instead, all of them heading for Ebay? Surely not. But then, why not?
Simple arithmetic would put the potential final payout as upwards of a quarter-million.
So the question is: Have lucky members of the record-buying public been the recipients of this windfall, or the artist himself?
Hey people, I'm only speculating! Whatever the case, this is an inspired prank well executed, and if there's a slab of dosh at the end of it, more power to the him, I say.