I am taking a hiatus from blogging. The posts I now add will be unedited and unpolished, please forgive me. I am using this platform as a storage place for interesting things. I am currently focusing on editing wikipedia articles on contemporary art instead. I encourage you to do the same and to follow still very active blogs like hyperallergic, c-monster, bldgblog, and more. thanks you.

555 Gallery and Studios, removing a recent Detroit Banksy to their gallery.
I am so upset by this, I wrote a letter

Dear 555 Gallery and Studios,

I do not think your removal of the Banksy work was criminal, but rather simply amazingly uninformed and probably for self serving reasons. How can you pretend that cutting out a work of graffiti, which is by artistic choice site specific and subject to environmental damage or graffiti clean up laws, and moving it near your gallery is for the protection of the art? Banksy makes graffiti art and art for galleries, obviously this wasn't one of those pieces he intended for a gallery. Unlike in Los Angeles where the owner of the property tagged wanted to make some quick cash and did not care about artistic intention, you are masquerading under the pretense you are helping the art, you are doing a kind act. At least the private owner of the Los Angeles building had a legal right to destroy a piece of art.

Imagine a world where museum directors sell site specific installations by Robert Irwin to private homes, a private collector moving Roden Crater by James Turrell nearer to his summer home, and museum employees hanging all the Picasso paintings upside down because they thought it would look fresh. These are all preposterous ideas that would never be carried through by informed individuals who wanted to protect and show original pieces of art. I thought minimalism had proven to the world that art is not always the sum of it's components. You cannot arrange some bricks on the floor and call it a work by Carl Andre, that would be a lie, similarly you cannot move a graffiti installation and say it is still the work by Banksy, it is not.

Your intentions of making the work by Banksy more accessible may have been pure, I doubt it, but you neglected to realize that you have not moved the work, you have destroyed it.

I would have liked to have seen this work,

Ben Valentine

I encourage you all to write a letter too
gallery555@555arts.org

More info here


Awesome recycling here

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