Paint Job Failes to Curb Street Art: Take That to the Banksy

A new salvo was fired last night in the battle between a Williamsburg building owner and some high-profile graffiti vandals street artists taggers.

The war began this past summer when British celebrity tagger Banksy did up a rather epic installation across the front (and sidewalk) of 60 North 6th Street - about half a block from the performance-art club Galapagos. The stencil-and-paintbrush work featured an innocent young girl straight out of 1950's Levittown, jumping rope on one side of the building's rollup door. Her neon-green rope trailed off the wall, through a series of crazy loops on the sidewalk, and terminated back on the building, on the opposite side of the door as a cable running into a stenciled electrical box - with an equally utopian little boy reaching up to throw the switch. Imnotsayin was lucky enough to witness Banksy and his assistant running from the scene, stencils in hand that night. The clever work was widely photographed and posted online, and Williamsburg had its very own Banksy.

A few weeks ago, when the building's owner rolled over the 'art' with beige latex, there was a palpable - though silent - sense of loss in the neighborhood. A few days later, a feeble marker scrawl on the freshly painted wall summed up the sentiment: "So wrong why destroy Banksy?"

This bit of censorship cleanup is all the more ironic when you consider one of the building's primary tenants is the progressive Southfirst Gallery.

At some point Friday night, New York's prolific street art collective Faile hit the building in the same spots that had been painted over. A classic Faile comic book cover on one side, and a pedophilic manga stencil on the other; Banksy's green rope still connecting the two panels over the sidewalk. Not as striking as the Banksy, perhaps, but seemingly a message to the property owner that in post-rezone Williamsburg, the buildings may belong to rich developers, but the walls are still the artist's domain.