Construction workers in Melbourne have taken a wrecking ball to three street stencils painted by internationally renowned street artist Banksy.
The images of rats, which the mysterious British identity had etched on the walls of the city’s iconic AC/DC Lane back in 2003, were believed to be the largest single collection of Banksy’s works in the entire bloody city.
But according to The Guardian, they were recently destroyed and binned by a mob of construction workers who were installing a new doorway.
Meyer Eidelson of street art tour company Melbourne Walks is the one who first noticed the stencils were MIA, telling Fairfax Media that they’d been “mindlessly loaded into a skip”.
The rat pieces join a long list of street art from the iconic painter to be destroyed in Melbourne, totaling five along AC/DC Lane alone in the space of two years.
While the location of the stencils was reportedly well-known among Melbourne’s art crowd, many punters made it a point of keeping their coords hush-hush in a bid to stop them from getting targeted by vandals.
But Eidelson now admits that this was the wrong approach.
“I am angry but perhaps it is because I feel guilty,” he wrote in a blog post. “I thought this iconic art was safer by hiding it rather than advertising its existence. I was wrong. It is time to speak up. The cultural heritage of our city is under threat.”
Eidelson reckons Melbourne’s iconic laneways are being tarnished by businesses and developers trying to cash-in on their artisan image.
“Only public pressure will change this careless planning mindset,” he wrote.
However, a spokesperson from the City of Melbourne has told Fairfax that, while their policy is to try to preserve legal street art murals where possible, that “the very nature of street art is that it is temporary, ephemeral and forever changing”.
“Melbourne is the street art capital of Australia and we see this art as vital to the city’s vibrancy,” she said.
Still, you should probably stop your construction workers from smashing it to bits then, right?
