…Exploring the role of the prankster as artist, activist and social observer and the significance of the prank in society.
Welcome to Art of the Prank, produced and edited by Joey Skaggs. Here you will find insights, information, news and discussions about art, pranks, hoaxes, culture jamming & reality hacking around the world – past, present and future – mainstream and counter culture. You are invited to contribute to its development. May your journey be filled with more than your expectations.
JOEY SKAGGS SATIRE AND ART ACTIVISM,
1960s TO THE PRESENT AND BEYOND
A new series of short oral history films,
produced and directed by Judy Drosd and Joey Skaggs
ART OF THE PRANK, THE MOVIE:
Andrea Marini’s award winning feature documentary about
New York artist and activist Joey Skaggs
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George Orwell was right…
“The US Department of Hate” by Coco Fusco, Noah Fischer, Pablo Helguera, Hyperallergic, February 20, 2026.
The Siren is back for a fourth edition. Read, ponder, and rise up before it’s too late.
The editors of The Siren have been thinking about the parallels between our current political moment and the dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel 1984 for quite a while, but the escalating efforts by the Trump Administration to wage war against immigrants and silence critics compelled us to devote our latest issue to highlighting those connections. After witnessing the killing, torture, and forced expulsion of immigrants by federal agents, as well as the execution of US citizens and the criminalization of activists, we have no choice but to conclude that Orwell’s “Hate Week” has arrived.
We’ve done our best to bring the perspectives of those who are under attack, and who have survived totalitarian regimes, to the foreground. Writers Junot Diaz, Enrique Del Risco, and Pamela Sneed shed light on the ways that authoritarianism is taking over our world. Political cartoonists hailing from Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, the Philippines, and the Americas offer their perspectives on the impact of tyrannical forces in our lives. Read the whole article here.
More from Everyone Hates Elon…
“Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s Arrest Photo Displayed at the Louvre Gallery in Paris” by Melissa Elizabeth, Yahoo!News, February 23, 2026.
Move over, Mona Lisa. There was a new “masterpiece” at the Louvre this week, and it didn’t involve a cryptic smile or centuries-old oil paint. Instead, it featured a very modern, very sweaty, and very stressed-out British royal.
In a scene that felt like a crossover between The Crown and Ocean’s Eleven, a framed photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (the man formerly known as Prince Andrew) was surreptitiously hung on the hallowed walls of the Louvre Museum in Paris. The image wasn’t a regal portrait; it was a gritty, high-definition “arrest photo” of the Duke leaving police custody.
On Sunday, February 22, 2026, visitors wandering through the Louvre’s Denon wing, home to the world’s most priceless treasures, spotted something decidedly out of place. Tucked near some of history’s greatest works was a gold-framed photograph of a man slumped in the back of a Range Rover, looking like he’d just seen a ghost (or perhaps a subpoena). Read the whole article here.
GUILTY… Until proven otherwise.
“He made a fake ICE deportation tip line. Then a kindergarten teacher called.” by Drew Harwell, Washington Post, February 20, 2026.
A Nashville comedian’s deportation hotline, set up as a joke, has gone viral among viewers who say it shows the “banality of evil personified.”
Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life.
Then in January of last year, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show. Read the whole article here.
Inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), Trump gets his comeuppance in Germany. Merde!
“‘Monster’s Paradise,’ lampooning US President Donald Trump, has world premiere at Hamburg Opera,” by Ronald Blum, AP News, February 3, 2026.
HAMBURG, Germany (AP) — Tobias Kratzer spoke in disbelief ahead of the world premiere of “Monster’s Paradise” by Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek, which features a gluttonous, ravenous, insatiable President-King, lampooning U.S. President Donald Trump.
“The metaphor has become a reality,” the Hamburg State Opera artistic director said in his office Sunday morning. “I’m really hoping in — what is it, eight hours? — the piece is not completely outdated because up until now it has always gone closer and closer to not being a satire but being reality.”
Jelinek, 79 and winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, collaborated with Neuwirth for the first time in two decades, the Austrian duo combining on a German-language libretto. The 57-year-old Neuwirth won the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, three years after she became the first woman composer with a work presented at the Vienna State Opera. Read the whole article here.
Who do you believe? Me or your lying eyes?
NOTE: To see the Moltbots (supposedly) in action, visit here: https://www.moltbook.com/m/general
“Moltbook was peak AI theater,” by Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review, February 6, 2026.
The viral social network for bots reveals more about our own current mania for AI as it does about the future of agents.
For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website’s tagline puts it: “Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.”
We observed! Launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht, a US tech entrepreneur, Moltbook went viral in a matter of hours. Schlicht’s idea was to make a place where instances of a free open-source LLM-powered agent known as OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot, then Moltbot), released in November by the Austrian software engineer Peter Steinberger, could come together and do whatever they wanted. Read the whole article here.