BANKSY // Keep It Spotless, 2007

  • Banksy’s 2007 Keep it Spotless collaboration with Hirst, maid lifts canvas to clean underneath.
    Banksy (Defaced Hirst), Keep It Spotless, 2007.
    Household gloss and spray-paint on canvas, 214 × 305 cm.
    Signed and dated 2007 on the reverse.
    © Banksy.
    Keep It Spotless is a rare collaboration, or collision, between Damien Hirst and Banksy. Originally a pristine Hirst Pharmaceutical Spot Painting, the work was hijacked by Banksy with the addition of a stencilled maid lifting up the rows of coloured dots as though they were a curtain, attempting to sweep something beneath. The juxtaposition of Hirst’s sterile, orderly aesthetic with Banksy’s gritty political commentary is both jarring and brilliant.
     
    The maid is a recurring Banksy figure, first seen in his 2006 Sweep It Under the Carpet mural in Chalk Farm, London. Here, she embodies institutional denial, drawing attention to the West’s tendency to conceal uncomfortable truths - poverty, inequality, environmental collapse - beneath a veneer of order and modernity. By literally "defacing" the pristine surface of Hirst’s work, Banksy transforms a symbol of contemporary art market excess into a biting commentary on what that market often ignores.
     
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  • “The art world is the biggest joke. It’s a rest home of the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.”

    – Banksy

    The image cuts directly against Hirst’s aesthetic of control, exposing the fragility of the spotless facade. Banksy’s maid becomes a metaphor for society’s collective urge to hide its failings – poverty, war, inequality, and environmental collapse – beneath layers of distraction and consumer polish. In hijacking Hirst’s canvas, Banksy didn’t just parody another artist, he attacked the very art market machinery that had elevated both of them to global notoriety.
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