But scraping a Banksy off its canvas – doesn’t that strike you as weird? 

However much it’s meant to safeguard it, 

can you decide so arbitrarily without the artist’s consent? 

But then, do you really believe that a mind like Banksy 

would ever create a work like that, the migrant child, 

there in the middle of the water, 

in Venice, 

exposed to salt spray, and through sheer negligence, 

not have calculated that sooner or later 

the work would deteriorate, eventually being lost? 

Come on.

Starting from the premise that street art is ephemeral by definition, 

it’s “guerrilla” art, hard-hitting, that escapes museums, galleries, the traditional market. 

If you cage it, sterilize it, mummify it, you’re committing aesthetic “m*rder”. 

It’s art that must strike and vanish before the system devours it. 

And then we’re talking about the same artist who shredded a work, 

just as it was hammered at auction, 

in front of the whole world,

(making it much more valuable!).

Maybe the destructive process is an essential part of some of his works, 

isn’t it? 

Let’s not bullshit ourselves. 

Sure, on one hand, you’re protecting the work, 

but is that really what matters most? 

On the other hand, you’re bastardizing the work; 

it’s like interrupting an artist’s performance: 

nobody would dream of stopping Marina Abramović 

halfway through one of her actions to “safeguard” the moment, 

or ripping the palette from Picasso while he was painting, 

just out of selfish desperation to not lose that canvas. 

This is chemical hunger for possession that devours meaning. 

Moreover, Banksy chose Venice specifically, 

a city that’s drowning physically and metaphorically, 

devoured by mass tourism.

The problem is systemic; 

it concerns man’s sick relationship with contemporary art:

he doesn’t get it. 

We’ve transformed everything into investment, 

into safe haven assets, into status symbols. 

Collectors buy Banksy like they buy Rolex, without understanding they’re buying the very negation of their own world. 

You really could have let the artwork follow its natural course, 

document it in its decay, 

photograph it as it faded, 

create an archive of its vanishing process. 

It would have had infinitely superior communicative power, 

it would almost have seemed like a person, 

a “deceased” artwork. 

Scraping it away and relocating it outside its canvas, 

without the artist’s prior consent, 

isn’t that some kind of “theft” masked as cultural conservation? 

If you remove it from the street (even if you want to save it!),

it’s no longer street art, 

it becomes completely bastardized. 

That’s not how life works. It’s not like a video game: 

where you just reload a “save” before death, 

and you’re back to square one, safe and sound. 

No, that’s not how it fucking works. 

And maybe there should be more respect for artists, 

especially for those who send powerful messages 

and give them space to express them, 

that work would probably have reached its peak when erased 

when by then the depicted child was only glimpsed, 

barely there, almost a ghost, 

representing with even more brutal power 

that sense of injustice. 

Without noise, without screaming, a statue of non-liberty, 

destined to disappear,

to be better remembered.