An avid patron of the arts, your Mayor happily drove this afternoon to the exhibit by guerilla artist Banksy – happily, that is, until I arrived in the desiccated industrial neighborhood south of downtown where the exhibit was tucked away, and saw a line snaking the length of Hunter Street and pouring out onto Santa Fe.

Such are the hazards of staying on art’s cutting edge. We’ve discussed Banksy before, namely his inspired prank involving Paris Hilton CDs: I surmised at the time that his devastating critique of her lifestyle would be just the thing to force her into a reassessment of her values; alas, I appear to have been incorrect. (More on the CD later.) Banksy’s an apparently well-funded provocateur who enjoys such pranks as surreptitiously placing hilariously repurposed paintings in art museums; he’s not above spraying a little graffiti around if it serves his, well, vision.

But the reason so many thousands of Angelinos tore themselves away from the day’s pro-football antics is that Banksy offended some animal-rights activists by including a live elephant that had been spray-painted bright colors standing in a quaint living-room tableau for this exhibit. Those attending were handed a small card that read, in part:

“There’s an elephant in the room. There’s a problem that we never talk about. … 1.7 Billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 Billion people live below the poverty line.� (A most astounding statistic, given that the World PopClock projects that, as I write this, there are a mere 6,544,778,901 people actually on the planet. Well, now it’s up to 6,544,783,291. Now, 6,544,784,023. I'm going to have to bail on the updates, but I guess what's it's suggesting is that enough people aren't dying.)

It continued: “Every day hundreds of people are made to feel physically sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?�

Banksy, as the exhibit makes clear, has issues with the very medium in which he labors (a malady from which I can assure you I, as the Mayor of Television, do not suffer). And rather than, yes, crusade for the homeless, thousands of us spent up to an hour in line – longer than it takes to get on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland on a summer day, for heaven’s sake – in order to receive a witty, if firm, slap on the wrist.

That line moved with a spirit-crushing slowness. In one third-floor apartment across the street, a guy tried to sell those stuck there beverages, but he was none too swift: He dropped a can on a truck parked below his fire-escape balcony, then, giving up, popped open a bottle of Champagne, sprayed a little on those below, then swigged from the bottle. He disappeared into his apartment, his exercise in capitalism collapsed, never to be seen again.

I doubt you could gather those attending this event under one roof under any other circumstances. Though there were plenty of inked and pierced fans (note to all of humanity: Don't pierce your septum; the resulting jewelry looks like a booger), the cleancut couple in front of me – teachers both, apparently – spent a great deal of time avidly discussing a lesson plan that involved coloring in construction-paper M&Ms. A few people, apparently inspired by the exhibit, boldly engaged in civil disobedience – um, freedom of expression – tagging buildings along the street at will.

A man distributed a flier summing up the ongoing controversy: “While I am better described as an animal lover than an animal activist, I was appalled to read about the painting of Tai (the elephant) for the titillation of the art-going public.� While I must right now insist that I was, in fact, not titillated by the elephant, not even remotely – perhaps because by Sunday evening, most of the paint had worn off, or perhaps I just don't have a body-painting fetish – it was heartwarming to see that people could get more distraught over the fate of one animal rather than millions of impoverished fellow humans.

After about 40 minutes in line, a rescue truck and two ladder trucks came down the street. A videographer, perhaps some TMZ.com wanna-be, jumped on the second ladder truck's back bumper as it headed down the narrow street. Some nervously wondered if that meant the exhibit would be shut down. I hopefully offered the notion that it was all part of the act. Neither scenario proved true; the fire trucks backed out immediately upon arriving, though the rescue truck stayed put. A shocking number of people were taking photos or video footage of the long line, as if they had never seen a crowd of people before in their lives. Or, perhaps, they were NSA operatives documenting patrons of an anti-war, anti-consumerism art show. Or, perhaps, they were NSA operatives documenting radicals attending, simply, an art show.

Outside the sultry warehouse in which the exhibit was placed, an angel wearing a gas mask floated above the crowd. Inside (after surviving a phalanx of security folks rooting out those who had stickers or spray-paint cans - they didn't want people to add further comment to Banksy's measured, reasoned artifice) was a hodgepodge of artworks that had been humorously defaced and some with iconic images bastardized or made fresh by propagandistic sloganeering (you can see them in the first link in this entry). Minutes after I got into the warehouse, Tai punched his timeclock and was herded into a trailer: I came this close to missing him. The problem of poverty, alas, had not been solved.

Actually, the elephant was hardly the most interesting thing in the exhibit. One room even hotter and sweatier than the others ran a film loop explicating Banksy’s ballsy exploits, including the notorious Paris Hilton prank. (Paris is seen on TV, too much: There’s your tenuous link for this entry in this blog.) While Banksy’s version of Hilton’s CD, with music by Danger Mouse, were unfortunately not available for sale, the funniest thing in the whole exhibit was a cube containing copies that were being fed upon by what appeared to be enormous Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches.

When I left, the line was just as long as it had been when I joined it, and there was less than an hour left before the exhibit was scheduled to shut down. And, of course, Tai had already packed his trunk and gone home. (Sorry to end such a long entry with such a lame joke, but after all the poverty stuff, it felt like the right thing to do.)