City does give a rat’s for Banksy’s wiped-out art
by Raymond Gill
theage.com.au
April 28, 2010
The curator of Citylights Projects in Hosier Lane, where the Banksy graffiti was erased, says the council is remiss.
Melbourne City Council sent the cleaners into Hosier Lane on Thursday to tidy up the rat-infested garbage, but they caught the wrong rat.
A request by deputy lord mayor Susan Riley to clean up the laneway, world famous for its colourful street art, inadvertently resulted in the painting over of a stencil of a rat by the celebrated British graffiti artist Banksy.
”I went down there on Thursday and saw the cleaners and said: ‘You realise you have just painted over a Banksy?’,” Hosier Lane resident Kerry Butcher told The Age yesterday. ”And they said: ‘We are just doing what we’re told’.”
Banksy, who created several stencils in Melbourne on a visit in 2003, is regarded as the world’s foremost street artist. In 2008, a London wall bearing one of his stencils allegedly sold on eBay for $472,528. His works on paper sell at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Last week lord mayor Robert Doyle was pictured in The Age under a stencil of himself in Hosier Lane as he praised its street art as a ”legitimate expression of artistic intent”. Continue reading “Melbourne Hopes Banksy Will Return to Re-Defile Their Streets”