Street Artist Blu Destroys 20 Years of His Work in Bologna to Protest an Exhibition 2 Favorite 

“Seeing street art exhibited in a museum is paradoxical and grotesque,” they [Blu and his comrades] wrote of Banksy and Co. “This ‘street art’ exhibition [featuring 250 works of street art, some of which were removed from their original public locations without the artists’ consent] is representative of a model of urban space that we must fight, a model based on private accumulation which commodifies life and creativity for the profits of the usual few people.” ...The show was curated by one of the city’s wealthiest patrons, Fabio Roversi Monaco, president of both the Academy of Fine Arts and the powerful Banca Imi.

The gesture is intended to expose the hypocrisy of a city that “on the one hand criminalizes graffiti, puts 16-year-old writers on trial, praises ‘urban decorum,’ and on the other celebrates herself as the cradle of street art and wants to retrieve it for valorization on the market.”