Street art – graffiti, uncommissioned public art, call it what you will – has found greater acceptance in the gallery and museum world over the last several years but the fit hasn’t always been comfortable. Anyone looking for evidence of the tensions now has a marquee example. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, run by the former New York gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch – a longtime champion of street art – late last week ordered a wall mural it had commissioned by Blu, an Italian graffiti artist, to be whitewashed because it found the artwork inappropriate. The mural, on a wall of the museum’s Geffen Contemporary wing, was planned as a kind of advertisement for an ambitious exhibition focusing on street art that the museum will open in April. But as Blu neared completion of the mural – which conveyed a strident antiwar message, showing rows of caskets draped with one-dollar bills instead of flags – the museum changed its mind and began painting it over on Thursday.
The decision, reported by the Los Angeles Downtown News, was made because the mural wall faces an ambulatory care center for veterans and a monument honoring Japanese-American soldiers in World War II. “The museum’s director explained to Blu that in this context, where MOCA is a guest among this historic Japanese-American community, the work was inappropriate,” the museum said in an e-mail, adding that Mr. Deitch had invited the artist to paint another mural.
In an e-mail to the Web site Animal New York, Blu described the incident as a “sad story” and told friends in the street-art world that he had no plans to return to Los Angeles before the exhibition opens.
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