KEY POINTS:
What is the biggest eyesore on the streets of east London? A giant rat with a knife and fork in its paws, apparently. Or a rioter throwing flowers.
Hackney council says these subversive images are making the place look dirty and have to go - even if they were spray-painted by Banksy, the art world's unlikely superstar.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have just paid £1 million ($2.7 million) for some of his work. From Hollywood to Hoxton, art collectors are prepared to pay big money for anything Banksy does, with his most expensive single piece, Space Girl and Bird, selling for £288,000 in April. But Hackney doesn't care.
The council says it will remove the art "whenever we find it".
"We have to clean up the walls," said a spokeswoman, confirming that the street cleaners are ready to blast some of modern British art's most distinctive images away.
"We can't make a decision as to whether something is art or graffiti. The Government judges us on the number of clean walls we have."
Never mind that art tourists come from all over the world to try to spot the Grim Reaper with the smiley face or some of the other 30 or so Banksy works inside the borough boundary.
A year ago, two officially sanctioned Banksy works were meant to be unveiled at the opening of a new square in Hackney, but when the covers were removed two days before the ceremony, the cleaners took exception to the stencils of a man's face and a girl in a gas mask and hosed both away.
"These were famous artworks by Banksy and of considerable value," said the co-operative responsible for them being there.
The council apologised. That disaster was thought to have led to a list of untouchable sites, but if there was one it has been thrown away.
"It is a myth that Hackney has a list of protected street art," said councillor Alan Laing, the member of the ruling cabinet responsible for the look of the streets. "Some might see graffiti as street art, but to most people it is just plain vandalism."
Banksy has carried out guerrilla-art stunts at London Zoo and this summer made a Stonehenge-style circle at the Glastonbury Festival out of portable loos. He painted a hole with blue sky on the West Bank wall built by Israel, and made a live elephant look covered in crimson flock wallpaper for a Los Angeles exhibition.
Gareth Williams, a picture auction specialist, said: "Perhaps the most incredible aspect of the Banksy phenomenon is neither his meteoric rise, nor the substantial sums of money that his art now commands, but that as a self-confessed guerrilla artist he has been so wholeheartedly embraced by the very establishment he satirises."
Embraced? Not everywhere. They may not know much about art in Hackney, but they know what they don't like.
Cleaning up
* $2.7 million - Various works sold to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, October 2007.
* $772,000 - Space Girl and Bird (commissioned by the band Blur for their album Think Tank), April 2007.
* $275,000 - Bombing Middle England, February 2007.
* $257,000 - Ballerina with Action Parts, February 2007.
* $150,600 - Mona Lisa, 2006.
* $67,000 - Three prints including Queen Victoria sitting on a woman's face sold to Christina Aguilera, 2006.
- Independent
