Within hours of its appearance on a downtown Manhattan sidewalk, the latest street art installation by rogue British artist Banksy was transformed by an anonymous, unauthorized collaborator into a visual statement of opposition to the administration of the city’s most famous — and beleaguered — art school.
Sometime last night or this morning, the priest in the painting was given a bushy white spray-paint beard which rendered him a dead ringer for Peter Cooper, the founder of the Cooper Union. At the same time, the cross that adorned his neck was replaced with a giant Flavor Flav style clock with a red face and hands pointing to midnight, the symbol of the Free Cooper Union activist movement.For more than a century Cooper Union, whose campus is just a stone’s throw away from the
