Welcome Back to Where & When. This will be a special edition to highlight the recent loss of a cultural icon. For several generations and cultures who inhabit the city, this was their Penn Station. I present this without further comment, but feel free to post thoughts.
It's a damn shame.
So the owner took it upon himself to wipe out all of this work. No consultation, no ceremony or grieving for the artists who came from around the world to express their creativity for twenty years. Just a bad whitewash akin to spitting all over their work and the spirit with which it had commenced, and then tell everyone he's a victim of circumstance too. Such horseshit.
I really hope that the 5 Pointz is revived somewhere else in the five boroughs, in a place just as large. Perhaps in the Bronx; the birthplace of Hip Hop and badly in need of good press. As an artist, I would boycott the new, much smaller space they've allotted in the new commercial/condo scheme on principle.
Maybe in Hunts Point or Soundview?
Hunts Point. The BX would be great. But what was special about 5 Pointz is the view you got of it on the 7 train. That was magical.
It's a shame, but I've always considered graffiti to be more of a temporary art form. Buildings get painted or torn down, the cityscape changes. It was inevitable. It was handled poorly, but it was inevitable.
It's the way it was handled that bothers me. If this were MoMA, I bet they wouldn't have been so anxious to get rid of it and never would attempt what they did with 5 Pointz. Besides, what people who denigrated it as vandalism fail to realize is that it was a cooperative program made specifically to offer an alternative to illegal graff. Naturally that cooperation would not last forever, but to be so vindictive in its destruction considering what it symbolized; it's not the Confederate flag or an SS symbol, it was something expressive that was accepted and appreciated worldwide. Take it down, but don't spit all over it.