Corporate Advertisers Brawl Over Banksy-Liberated Billboard

You know the tide has turned when a company actually wants to have anti-corporate graffiti subverting their corporate signage. But Banksy is big business these days, no matter if he is a subversive  force who'd rather compare the working stiff to a monkey than paint his name endlessly and sell t-shirts. Las Vegas-based company The Light Group is super pissed off that billboard company CBS has removed its L.A. billboard, which is thought to have been re-worked by Banksy. Heavy speculation has placed Banksy in L.A. for The Oscar he's nominated for (in other news, he's actually invited to the show now) and recently the billboard was liberated subverted to show an intoxicated Mickey Mouse hanging with a loaded Minnie Mouse. If it's a real Banksy, ker-ching, it could be worth a zillion-and-a-half dollars. So guess what happened?

So when CBS took down the piece this week in service of the company renting their billboard space, a fight erupted between the two companies and was caught by those ominpresent devils at TMZ. A spokesmen for The Light Group tells Fox News that they loved the reworked billboard to the point that it almost seems like these guys sees their previous billboard as the crap pile depicting a bullshit fantasy about Las Vegas that it was. Okay, they don't admit that, but the guy clearly has the hots for Banksy, telling Fox News, "We were flattered Banksy tagged on our ad -- it was epic." This would actually all make a pretty funny Banksy stunt in its own, getting a bunch of corporate cogs to fight over his vandalism to prove just how down they are. Either way, don't expect such a warm reception (or zillions of dollars in anything but fines) next time you climb up there.