And Here We Are: Divisadero Street Art Incident Explained
And now it's gone...
After our Laser Kitten Vandalized! post went up yesterday, we received a landslide of comments, many of them rightly questioning what makes one piece of artwork more valid than another. A few others tucked in there also described a "misunderstanding" with what we now know was a legal, approved mural space for both the original three artists (named in the post) and the newest artist. After following up on a few of the comments and Internet leads, we got in contact with Gaia, who had been in the process of creating the second-layer painting. In a phone call earlier this afternoon, we discussed the bulls (calves, actually - more on that in a second), the kittens and the mural space in general.
The problem here was never about whether one piece of work was better (or cuter, or more hip, or had more lasers, etc etc), more allowable or even just more agreeable in the public space, but whether everyone involved in the project actually knew what the project was.
The mural space, which was arranged by Gallery Heist, was intended to be a temporary piece of work from the start. The Laser Kittens a.k.a. Kittenzilla, was only the first layer in what would eventually become a rich palimpsest (look, big art words!) of changing murals. In terms of right to use the mural space, Gaia was just as valid as Bunnie, Ezra and Garrison.
What wasn't communicated to Kittenzilla's original artists, it seems, was how long their work would remain in its original state. [Note: while this post was being written, one of the artists explained her position in the comments here.] So, when SFist received tips that there was something new painted over the mural, it came as a surprise to both neighborhood locals who sent it in and the original artists (and myself, if I may step out of the editorial "we" for a moment, since I live in the neighborhood).
That Gaia prefers to work at night certainly didn't help the perception that this was a vandal's work, but again - that is the nature of these things. Everyone has the conditions they like to work under and the surprise that comes with spotting a piece of work that appeared overnight is part of the delight of living in a city where these things can and do happen. Unfortunately, as we pointed out in the original post, there's precedent for things like this to be actually malicious.
The comparisons to what happened to Chris Lux's mural end there though. Gaia's work-in-progress, which would have been called "Golden Calves", does sound pretty rad and looked promising: Two calf heads, with gold horns and floating gold-orb things referencing Damien Hirst. For more of Gaia's work, we recommend you take a stroll to Polk and Eddy in the Tenderloin, where our friends at Uptown Almanac snagged some photos of a recent piece.
So what did we learn? Well, we could easily say this rotating-mural experiment backfired, since it's gone now. Or we can put on our art critic monocles, sip our chardonnays and try to bang out some rational argument about the nature of temporary art and how it will most likely delight, surprise, confuse and anger people - not necessarily in that order, but by those criteria the mural was a huge success! It took exactly 1.5 iterations before the whole thing was removed from its "gallery space", no Congressional intervention required.
Also: everyone is getting Jump to Conclusions Mats for Christmas. It's a mat. With conclusions on it. That you can jump to.
(Note: we reached out to Gallery Heist for comment, but hadn't heard back before this was posted.)
[GaiaStreetArt.com]
[MissionMission]
[Monsters&Critics]
[Uptown Almanac]