Everyone agrees the Melbourne street artist Mic Porter does not hate Jews. The mayor of Port Phillip, Heather Cunsolo, does not believe it. Nobody claims he does, yet Port Phillip Council is painting over his commissioned mural. See Benita Kolovos’s “Melbourne council to remove mural it says unintentionally offended local Jewish community” in The Guardian. Mic Porter is a Melbourne street artist. He has been painting faces in this style on the building walls in Melbourne using waste/leftover paint for about 20 years. He does faces, nothing else, no other content. Why is Porter being censored ..read more

Banksy and the Stolen Girl is the story of the theft of Banksy’s stencil called “The Sad Girl”. The stencil was on the exit door of the Bataclan Theatre in Paris, the door through which many concertgoers escaped the massacre by terrorists in 2015 when 90 people were killed and 413 were injured — a stencil that quickly became as famous and as unsalable as Oscar Wilde’s tomb … so, you’ve stolen Wilde’s tomb and are fencing it out of the back of a truck, “want to buy some artistic marble?” But, I digress… It is a well-told, thought-provoking story of an art theft. A transnational police investig ..read more

You would think I would know what I’m doing after all these years of writing this blog. After one thousand and seven hundred-something blog posts, you would think I’d have learnt something from the experience. Viki Murray stencils After four hundred-and-something blog posts about street art, I no longer know where to begin a blog post. Have I run out of things to say? When I started this blog, I called it “Melbourne Art and Culture Critic”. The word ‘culture’ was meant to indicate that it was about more than just art. That distinction between art and not art didn’t matter; it was all visual cu ..read more

Street Art Sculpture from the streets of Melbourne in 2023. Casting my eye around at the various cast objects… Discarded The carved objects… Daniel Worth The ceramic objects… Far4washere The assembled objects, the painted objects, the fish, the google eyes … For more about unauthorised public sculptures, see my earlier posts: Street Art Sculpture 12 2022 Street Art Sculpture 11 2021 Street Art Sculpture 10 2020 Street Art Sculpture 9 2018 Street Art Sculpture 8 2017 Street Art Sculpture 7 2016 Street Art Sculpture 6 2015  street art sculpture in the Whitechapel Area Street Art ..read more

In the last decade, many murals have been painted on walls in Melbourne and internationally. One of the reasons for the current spate of murals is the currently available technology for mural painting. A quick look at YouTube demonstrations of these new digital resources, like the Da Vinci Eye App or Mural Maker App, will explain why so many of these murals have a photorealistic quality. Art is a combination of technology, media, resources, and not simply the desire or skill of the artist. The general public is unaware of the influence of technology on the history of painting. David Hockney ..read more

Looking around Brunswick and Coburg at the street art and graffiti in the first half of 2023. There are a couple of places to go where there is consistently quality work. These are the laneways around the old silo at Tinning Street with the portrait of Jacinda Ardern, the Upfield line bike path and the Land of Sunshine.  The Land of Sunshine consists of laneways off Lygon Street around Ann Street. As well as many quality pieces of graffiti, there are works by Drez and XUF, two very different street artists currently working in Melbourne. There is a whole building painted by Drez whose co ..read more

Very little grows in the laneways of Melbourne. The sun refuses to shine there, and the granite, concrete, and brick offer little room for plants. Yet paint and paper foliage climbs the walls from flower pots or springs forth full of life — the creations of Melbourne street artist Manda Lane. Full disclosure (words few art critics write) I commissioned Manda Lane to do a piece in my backyard. The professionalism that Manda Lane brought to the commission rivalled the architects. Showing the client what the finished work will look like is a winner. Her work looks great against the black Weather ..read more

Will Coles, the street art sculptor of cast concrete, was at the opening of This is Not a Toy Store’s new location on Lygon Street. He was handing out postcards with an Apocalypse Now meme: “I love the smell of street art in the morning. The smell, you know, that graff smell. Smells like … a fashionable investment opportunity.” Coles reminded me that none of the street art sculptors I wrote about in my book Melbourne’s Sculptures is still working on Melbourne’s streets. Seven years after, where are they now? Coles is living in Spain. Mal Function is busy with his foundry. CDH is reproducing g ..read more

As a teenager, I thought the third-scale Parthenon of Calton Hill overlooking Edinburgh was the wankiest construction I’d ever seen. Intended as a memorial to the  Napoleonic War and to emphasise Edinburgh’s claim to be “the Athens of the north”, it failed at both. So I’m not sure about another one of the same scale in the NGV’s sculpture garden. As a symbol of western slave-ownership delusional exceptionalism, the Parthenon is best not remembered for its white sun-bleached marble but as a painted temple. Given this, I prefer the Temple of Boom to the one in Edinburgh. The Temple of Boom ..read more

Jetso & Pezzer ..read more