It's a stencil of a protestor! And, wait! Get this! He's throwing flowers!
The trouble with Banksy is that his art is infantile, witless shit, and his stunts are self-congratulatory trivia.
Charlie Brooker says it best:
12.20am Cunt
Nathan Barley purchases a copy of Knees Royale, the debut album from a knowingly lo-fi Westbourne Grove-based band called The Knees, whose music is a thinly-veiled amalgamation of the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (yet manages to be precisely one-hundredth as rewarding) and whose CD cover boasts a specially commisioned portrait of the queen wearing a Bomberman helmet, sprayed rebeliously on the wall of a Soho alleyway by dangerous urban street art phenomenon Banksy, whose provocative stencilled images of riot vans and monkeys effortlessly shatter the cosy mindsets of all uptight “normals” who see them, while simultaneously providing a vague sense of inclusive 21st-Century somethingism to the self-orbiting cuntrungs who frequent the kind of gentrified media locales in which is sixth-form wall-splatterings tend to be somewhat conveniently displayed.
— TVGoHome, October 2002
If you derive intellectual stimulation from his work then you are a fool. If you describe it as “provocative” or “subversive” in a national newspaper, in a magazine, or on your weblog, then I hate you.
— Michael Williams, 9th August, 2005