'That's hot': British prankster alters Paris Hilton CDs
Record stores in Britain are searching through copies of Paris Hilton's album because of fakes planted by guerrilla artist Banksy.
The faux CDs include topless images of the celebrity heiress as well as a picture in which she sports the head of a dog.The sticker promotes the album's fake singles: Why Am I Famous?, What Have I Done?and What Am I For?
Hilton's bubblegum pop is replaced by 40 minutes of remixed music— by a musician identified as "DM"— in which the celebutante's catch phrase "That's Hot" from her Simple Lifetelevisionseries is dubbed over.
"They're very subtly done and do look like the original albums," said Jo Brooks, a spokeswoman for Banksy. "You have to look quite carefully to see what he's done."
The booklet inside the CD,featuring a picture of Hilton emerging from a luxury car, now includes a group of homeless people looking on.
Brooks said the artist had hidden 500 fake CDs in branches of HMV, Virgin and independent record stores all over the UK. The album, Paris, hit No. 6 on the Billboard charts when it was released the week of Aug. 22 in the U.S.
Brooks said Banksy switched CDs and left the original barcode so people would buy the CD without realizing it wasn't what they had paid for.
No one noticed the doctored CDs
A spokesman for HMV said no customers have complained so far and none of the doctored versions have been returned.
"I guess you can give an individual such as Banksy a little bit of leeway for his own particular brand of artistic engagement," the spokespersontold the BBC.
The spokesman also said the chain had recovered seven CDs from two shops in Brighton, on the south coast of England.
"The album hasn't been selling that well so we managed to find three in one store and four in another because there weren't that many on the shelves."
He said HMV is planning to auction them off because "presumably they'll be worth quite a bit and highly collectible."
Officials at Virgin Megastores said their staff were looking for the fake CDs.They also said that they tipped off their hats to Banksy:"It's a very good stunt" a Virgin spokesman said.
Banksy, who has managed to keep his identity a secret, has a history of artistic pranks.
He hung faux artworks in major galleries in New York, Paris and London, and managed to place a rock painting of a spear-toting man pushing a shopping cart in the British Museum.
He stenciled a series of images, such as mountain vistas, on the Palestinian side of Israel's West Bank security barrier last year.
With files from the Associated Press