Art Pranks - The Art of the Prank

December 12, 2025

Guerrilla of My Dreams

It’s about time…

“Learn ‘How to Be a Guerrilla Girl’ at The Getty,” by Beverly Press, November 26, 2025.

Coinciding with the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl,” on view at the Getty through April 12, 2026, offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of the iconic feminist art collective.

Drawing from the Getty Research Institute’s remarkable Guerrilla Girls archive, the exhibition highlights the strategies – anonymity, data gathering, protest actions, culture jamming and grassroots distribution – that have defined the group’s groundbreaking practice since the mid-1980s.

The Guerrilla Girls have created a newly-commissioned work for the exhibition that explores the Getty’s own collection of European painting and sculpture. Using comic strip style speech bubbles, they reimagine the voices of women represented in these artworks through a twenty-first century lens. The commission exposes deeply rooted biases in the representation of women in Guerilla Girls characteristic witty style. Read the whole article here.

November 25, 2025November 25, 2025

From the Vault: Joey Skaggs’ Thanksgiving Dinner 1981

Thanksgiving Dinner 44 years ago.

Joey Skaggs, with the help of friends, students from the School of Visual Arts, and Abyssinian Baptist Choir, created a stark portrayal of a Thanksgiving feast at the United Nations Plaza on Thanksgiving Day.

November 25, 2025

AI With a Cause

“Art-dropping” gets easier.

“Prankster With a Cause Sneaks AI Artwork Into UK Museum ,” by Rhea Nayyar, Hyperallergic, November 12, 2025.

Artist Elias Marrow said he wanted to draw attention to rising hunger and poverty in the country.

An unsolicited digital print hung undetected for several hours on the walls of the National Museum Cardiff in Wales after it was installed by a conceptual artist in the museum’s contemporary art wing. Later revealed to be AI-generated, Elias Marrow’s “Empty Plate” (2024) bamboozled museum visitors and staff alike, as no one could explain its presence.

The print emulates an oil portrait of a nondescript young boy in a school uniform, holding a bare plate on his lap with a dour expression. Per the artist’s website, “It is unclear whether [the boy] waits to be fed, punished, or simply forgotten.” While the subject appears to have the correct number of fingers, other aspects of the painting, including the jumbled alphabet on his uniform logo and the overall yellowish tinge to the work, are undeniable evidence of generative AI — though Marrow’s accompanying wall text does not mention it. Read the whole article here.

November 25, 2025

Science is catching up to Joey Skaggs

Been there, done that! Watch Pandora’s Hope movie, which is featured as a hoax-in-progress in Andrea Marini’s Art of the Prank movie.

“Scientists are racing to grow human teeth in the lab,” by Jacopo Prisco, CNN, October 23, 2025.

It’s not surprising that many people fear the dentist. Replacing a tooth often requires invasive surgery and implanting a titanium screw into a patient’s jawbone, then waiting months for that to strengthen into an artificial root, before attaching a crown or cap on top of it.

But research groups around the world are working to find ways to implant or grow real biological teeth in a human jaw. Read the whole article here.