Buff or Bluff?

Los Angeles' MoCA, under the direction of Jeffrey Deitch (the first and only art dealer/gallery owner at the helm of a major U.S. museum) is at work on the first major survey of the history of graffiti and street art in the United States. The retrospective, titled Art in the Streets, will take place in April 2011 and will span from the 1970s to the present. It will feature over 100 artists (including Basquiat, Space Invader, Banksy, and Mister Cartoon), 25 of whom will have installations and murals on the premises. Deitch commissioned Italian street artist Blu to paint one such mural on the wall of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. The work, which depicted a series of wooden caskets draped in dollar bills (a replacement for the American flags that cover the coffins of those soldiers killed in combat), was buffed and whitewashed by the museum yesterday morning - less than 24 hours after its completion.

Was Blu's anti-war/death statement simply too controversial for the museum? One hell of a boring street art exhibit that would make, and so atypical of J. Deitch - what of his work with Kehinde Wiley, Dash Snow, Ryan McGinness, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel? Or did the mural perhaps offend the museum's veteran neighbors? The wall faces a Veterans Administration building and is within sight of a war memorial, but a VA representative said that they had placed no complaint to MoCA.

Just speculatin', but the reason for the paint-and-strip seems fairly obvious to me - Blu must have another amazing stop-motion vid up his sleeve, one that will serve as a commentary on the ephemerality of graffiti as an aesthetic genre and political movement. Why else would the museum erase a work they themselves commissioned? Pretty fresh when considering the many incarnations of the Deitch-helmed Bowery mural project, one of the best modern examples of the interaction between street art and fine art, not to mention the recent Underbelly Project. And what could serve as a more thematically perfect piece for the retrospective? Heard it here first, folks! If I'm wrong, well ... shit. That sucks.