Please Paint Over This Thing

put it out of its misery

When the Banksy first appeared on the side of a building off Victoria Park Road, it was cute. It looked like this. I liked having it in the neighborhood. But if you're going to paint on someone else's building, you need to accept they can paint back over it whenever they want.


The view that these things should be enshrined and preserved is nonsensical. Painting over them actually improves their legacy. And would also likely increase the number of people who claim to have seen it in person by an order of magnitude or so.

For this particular work of cutesy stencilling, the wall itself aged, as they do. Eventually most of it got painted black, leaving just the painter. Of course, the thing no longer made sense. It worked as a whole with the pre-existing graffiti. Just the artist figure by itself is not particularly compelling. I was fine with painting over the whole thing when it still was a whole thing. Now, preserving just what's left is kind of dumb.

Which is why I was glad to see some scaffolding and some guys with scrapers out there. I hope they scrape and paint the whole thing. The painter's hand has already been scraped off, which is encouraging. Please keep going!