Philistines....

Good one Melbourne city council!

Street art...ppffftt!

Last week they sent in the "anti-grafitti" crew to clean up the walls in Hosier lane, behind the Forum theatre. They painted over a valuable piece of stencil art left by UK street-artist Banksy.

This appeared in Tuesday's The Age:

THOMAS HUNTER, April 27, 2010

In a massive blow to fans of Melbourne's vibrant, CBD street-art scene, City of Melbourne workers have destroyed a little-known piece of stencil art left by world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy.
Local businesspeople were alerted to the mistake this morning, after the image of a parachute-wearing rat floating down the wall of a building behind the Forum Theatre in Hosier Lane was painted over by council workers as part of a maintenance program.
"Our cleaning contractors were instructed to clean the wall as part of their regular street cleaning schedule," City Of Melbourne CEO Kathy Alexander said.

Well here's something that lord mayor Robert Doyle and City of Melbourne CEO Kathy Alexander could do with knowing:

a) Melbourne is the Australian - if not world - capital of stencil art.

b) This is the third, and probably last, Bansky original that has been destroyed in Melbourne.

c) Robert and Kathy, you are idiots.

d) How embarrassing.

Yesterday, Mr. Doyle said this was a shame but "it's not the Mona Lisa, is it"?

He'd probably say this is just a toilet:

But anyone with a passing interest in modern culture knows it as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), the famous work that shocked and challenged art traditionalists: This is a urinal. Why can it not also be art?

In fact, to Duchamp, the Mona Lisa was not THE Mona Lisa. According to his re-working of Davinci's mysterious lady, he turned her into an ambiguous lady-man by pencilling in a goatee and moustache and renaming her L.H.O.O.Q., 1919. The name when pronounced in French is a coarse French pun — "elle a chaud au cul" - translating colloquially as "She's got a hot ass."

The moral of the story is this: