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Splashing the Art World With Anger and Questions
June 30, 2007
by Michael Kimmelman
Until the pranks turned ugly, it was heartening to follow the dust-up between a bunch of street artists and their nemesis or nemeses, identity unknown. As The New York Times reported this week, for some time works of stenciled graffiti art and wheat-pasted posters slapped onto walls in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan have been splashed with paint and scrawled with messages of protest.
Anonymous claimants have distributed various communiqués taking responsibility for the sabotage, citing the Situationists of the 1950s and ’60s as inspiration. One manifesto declared street art “a bourgeois-sponsored rebellion,” politically impotent, facilitating gentrification.
