crappy art, but still ...

I heard about this at a show I played Friday night with The Drastics at Q4... I personally don't care for the mural ... it's not that aesthetically pleasing and seems to want to stir controversy without any cohesive motivation... For me, it looks like a collection of "controversial" images; the same kind of iconography you would see at an anti-IMF rally where half the protesters aren't really sure what the IMF even does ... Of course, this is not addressing the point (but does stroke my elitist art ego) ... the point being that a mural on private property should reserve some rights against removal (barring blatant hate mongering, swearing, etc ... I'm sure Pimpernel could weigh in more on this, he just graduated from Lawyer School!) ... When I worked on North Avenue, the entrance to our gallery was somewhat set in from the rest of the building and therefor allowed easier coverage for taggers, bums and (most recently) idiot frat boys who need to piss all over our door ... Every once in a while I'd come in and see that Daley's Graffiti Blasters had stopped by and removed all the tags from our entrance way .. I don't know if it was that we were a gallery but more "artistically" inclined taggers seemed to frequent our little vestibule ... there was some real cool stuff on those walls.. gone forever ... of course we were just renters and so also had little say in what went on outside our doors ... and since the neighborhood was beginning to gentrify in a very major and immediately recognizable way (ie a Bebe, Marc Jacobson and Intermix all going in on Damen within 2 months) I'm sure the buildings owners were trying to "clean up" and capitalize on jacking rent up as quickly as possible ... Anyway, the point is: censorship=bad ... coulda used the 400 bucks it cost to cover that mural (I'm guessing at the cost ... probably 4 or 5 guys each getting 30-50 bux an hour plus equipment etc etc) and filled some potholes or gotten rid of some ACTUAL graffiti like all the crappy gang tags ...