This clown is wanted.
The NYPD’s vandal squad is on the hunt for the notoriously elusive graffiti artist Banksy, who has racked up 16 installments across the city — most of them spray-painted on walls — in what he promises will be a monthlong New York “residency.”
Police sources said Wednesday that cops are scrutinizing all the surveillance videos they can find from areas where the guerrilla artist has left his famous wall-art stencils so far during his two-week-plus spree.
“They want to question him in connection with the vandalism,” one law-enforcement source said.
“If they catch him, he will be charged with vandalism.”
Mayor Bloomberg on Wednesday echoed that sentiment, calling Banksy a vandal, not an artist.
“Graffiti does ruin people’s property and it’s a sign of decay and loss of control . . . Nobody’s a bigger supporter of the arts than I am. I just think there are some places for art and some places where — no art,” the mayor said.
“And you running up to somebody’s property or public property and defacing it is not my definition of art. Or it may be art, but it should not be permitted, and I think that’s exactly what the law says.”
The mayor’s office said later the city would remove any of Banksy’s creations on public property, such as an installation that turned up Monday at the Brooklyn Promenade.
Meanwhile, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz took time after a ribbon cutting to go and catch a glimpse
of Banksy’s latest work — a giant, fiberglass sculpture of iconic fast-food mascot Ronald McDonald having his oversized clown shoes shined by a live Banksy assistant.
“Just ran into Banksy on Boston Rd. and Seabury,” Diaz gleefully tweeted, attaching a photo of himself admiring the work.
Witnesses said the work was set up outside three McDonald’s in The Bronx Wednesday — on Westchester Avenue, Boston Road and at East Tremont and Arthur avenues.
After loading the statue into a black rental van in silence, the “shoe shiner” and a driver headed for a gas station, where the driver said, “I’m just the driver. I can’t talk.” The duo then drove off into Manhattan.
On his Web site, Banksy promised, “The sculpture will visit the sidewalk outside a different McDonald’s every lunchtime for the next week.”
Banksy also offered an audio explanation of his work, with a narrator calling the work “a critique of the heavy labor required to sustain the polished image of a mega-corporation.”
“Is Ronald’s statuesque pose indicative of how corporations have become the historical figures of our era? Does this hero have feet of clay — and a massively large foot print to boot?” he says.
McDonald’s did not respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Yoav Gonen and Jamie Schram