Posted on 02/14/2022 3:26:33 PM PST by simpson96
Brooklyn artist Michael McLeer, who goes by the name Kaves, has filed a lawsuit in Brooklyn Federal court against the New York City Police Department demanding an immediate halt to a graffiti cleanup campaign that he says has wrongly destroyed authorized artworks in numerous instances.
In April, according to the lawsuit, the NYPD destroyed Kaves’s mural Death From Above, created in 2008 alongside another artist, Revs, with the full permission of the property owner.
“When I found out this piece was destroyed, I was devastated,” Kaves said in a statement. “When I made this work, I was full of pride. I felt it had an epic quality to it. It was a piece dedicated to my mother and became one of my oldest public pieces, standing untouched for 13 years.”
The case “is about the NYPD’s attack on graffiti and street art that endangers hundreds of valuable, recognized, and permitted artworks across the five boroughs,” the artist said in the lawsuit.
Kaves’s lawyers said the NYPD’s “haphazard” coordination of the graffiti clean-up campaign involved volunteers, and was heralded as a collaboration between the public and the police department.
Contacted by Artnet News, the NYPD said it does not comment on pending litigation.
The lawsuit cites an April 10 tweet from the NYPD showing the mural being covered over with gray paint. The accompanying text reads: “During today’s Community & NYPD graffiti cleanup: Officers partnered up with volunteers from around Farragut to clean graffiti from 115 York Street.”
(Excerpt) Read more at news.artnet.com ...
The York Pizza ad was a nice touch.
His murals are awful, just glorified graffiti.
I have seen better on the sides of box cars.
All graffiti should be painted over within 24 hours.
It takes too much effort for thugs and losers to keep putting it up if their thug friends never get to see it.
Just graffiti, nothing glorified about it.
Looking at that “Mural” gives me indigestion.
I’m sure the artist had fun while doing it, but the result looks like a heavy duty MESS.
The total work looks over worked. The areas of cursive script ruin what could have been a nice colorful landscape. Those heavy black shadows of the ‘words’ has light coming from opposite directions, producing another
kink in the presentation.
Too much. It’s like using 4 boxes of cake mix and pouring the batter into a tiny 8” x 8” baking pan.
“I Can’t Breathe!!” said the cake pan.
What’s it supposed to be? A 3 year old’s refrigerator’s art is more understandable. That said, it’s up to the owner of the building to have whatever he wants on it within the laws against vulgarity.
well it wasn’t the typical black on grey so often seen...LOL
One person’s ‘art’ is another person’s graffiti...
Permission to paint is not a promise to leave the “artwork” in place forever.
I guess the outcome of the lawsuit will depend on the wording of "authorized" and if it applies to this graffiti.
It looks like sh*t to me. BTW, he’s not suing the NYPD. The maggot is suing the NYC taxpayers.
The mural was low IQ trash, but it was colorful and more visually stimulating than a gray wall. The paint-over made a grim area grimmer for no discernable benefit.
The NYPD must have had either permission of the wall’s owner, or a legal right by statute to paint over the mural. The artiste should get zip.
Obviously his “art” was not sufficient enough “art” to pass the test nor had sufficient permits for display. Looks like crap. Good paint job, guys!
Woodside, Queens, NYC in the 70s...handball wall in local schoolyard was constantly being “tagged”.
One Saturday morning a local teen showed up with a ladder and some cardboard boxes filled with epoxy paint and tape.
By the time he was done, the wall duplicated the cover art of the Pink Floyd album, “Dark Side Of The Moon”
No one ever “tagged” that wall again. That mural remained untouched for years until the City tore down the wall to enlarge the school.
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