Los Angeles Murals in Danger

The Artnewspaper has a very good, yet disturbing article on how vandals are defacing some of the 2,000 outdoor public  art murals in Los Angeles with graffiti.  The article notes that in the past the collection of city murals were protected from graffiti and tagging  by a self imposed code not to harm or destroy the artworks.  That code is now being broken. 

Complicating the issue is how to clean the murals of graffiti due to artist rights laws, such as Visual Artists Rights Act and the California Art Preservation Act, which state the art can't be altered without permission and/or participation from the artist.  It is really unfortunate that we may lose some of our culture heritage and also perhaps deny furture projects because of vandalism.

Murals have been a part of the city’s rich artistic fabric for generations. The 1960s and 1970s saw an explosion of public murals with artists such as Frank Romero following in the footsteps of pioneering muralists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros whose downtown mural América Tropical, 1932, is nearing the end of a 23-year conservation project. Murals continued to be a popular form of public art into the 1980s when several were commissioned for the 1984 Olympics Games in Los Angeles. The city boasts around 2,000 murals including the recently restored The Great Wall of Los Angeles, begun in 1976, which at 2,750 ft is the world’s longest.

Copyright laws

Graffiti is on the rise in Los Angeles generally. According to a report in The New York Times, the city removed 35.4 million sq. ft of graffiti during the financial year ending 30 June 2011—a jump of 8.2% from last year. But the city’s budget to remove graffiti was slashed in 2011 by 6.5% to $6.6m.

While agencies such as Caltrans spend $2.5m to $2.7m each year removing graffiti from Los Angeles’ freeways, tagging on murals cannot be removed for fear of artists invoking copyright laws, particularly the Visual Artists Rights Act and the California Art Preservation Act, which forbid the defacing or destruction of public art without the permission of the artist. “There are two laws—one state and one federal—that specifically mandate that once an artist creates a piece, no one but the artist is allowed to touch it,” says Vincent Moreno from Caltrans District 7, which serves Los Angeles and Ventura counties. The one exception is if the tag contains profanity or obscenity in which case Caltrans will paint over it. Caltrans has been threatened with lawsuits by artists for painting over murals, “but we’ve worked out some of those problems”, says Moreno. Lawsuits have proved costly in the past—in 2008, the US government and contractors had to pay Kent Twitchell $1.1m after one of his murals was painted over.

To read the full article, click HERE.