Street art at the museum

The Museum of the History of Bologna had a special exhibit of street art including Banksy, the famous street artist from England and also Blu the fantastic street artist of Bologna. There were others that I’m not familiar with as well as some very modern and curious art works which are clearly not street art. It was quite a show. We then went through the long permanent exhibit of Bologna history about which I have already written a blog post here.

And there is a very unfortunate postscript to this whole story. For whatever insane reason Blu, the incredibly talented Bolognese street artist, decided to destroy all of his street art here in Bologna as a protest. I almost couldn’t believe it when I was watching the television news and saw people scraping off and painting over some of  his incredible murals. I found a photo of the destruction in progress. A quote from Blue (whose identity remains unknown):“There’s no more Blu in Bologna, and there won’t be any until the fat cats will keep getting fatter,” the artist announced in a laconic message on Blu’s website explaining the action. “For acknowledgments and complaints you know who to turn to.”

The quote above comes from his website and is written in Italian and the translation is a bit strange but so is the original which uses a Roman dialect word for to eat. It’s literally something like that “the fat cats will eat” – maybe it’s used in a reflexive sense, who knows. It is certainly a play on words.

In any case you can still go to the website at the link above where there are photos of Blu’s work in many other parts of the world as well as those that were destroyed in Bologna.

Art is still art and wanton destruction is a STUPID thing to do in protest.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 2nd, 2016 at 7:49 am and is filed under Culture, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.