Posted 10:30 AM by Gene

The TRIB LALA Edition continues to make a big stink about that painted-over mural:

If only the elusive wielder of this giant roller brush could have tackled those kiddie-porn ads for American Apparel.

Well, some people have tried something like that -- with liquor and ciggie ads in the inner-city. (We suspect this merited a few self-righteous words from the hacks, who until recently benefited from the tobacco industry's munificence.) The problem is that murals sprout up where buildings won't; this is a golden age of slightly-tacky-looking populist murals precisely because this is an age of dross for cities. I would rather see a building go up than another mural.

[W]hat [is art], who decides and, alas, how many people really care?

We can have a pretty fair idea from posterity. Alas, we can have no good idea from NEWS HACKS, who nearly bequeathed us a Tinkertoy pile at Ground Zero, who swoon over vandalism in the guise of "hip" rebellion, who call every third-rate opera and fourth-rate TV drama and fifth-rate CGI fest a MASTERPIECE. Maybe painting over that mural wasn't such a hot idea, but in the end I'd rather trust in the judgments of time than in insulated high-paid scribblers.

I repeat what I said before: this mural gets RESTORED -- at TAXPAYER EXPENSE.