Banksy Street Art Wall removed from the streets in Detroit - and into a gallery

A Banksy street art piece in Detroit has been... Kidnapped? Banksy painted on a run down factory wall, later that wall was removed and brought to a gallery. The folks at 555 Gallery and Studios want to keep the street art alive and on display for everyone, but then there are those who say taking the street art away from where it was changes the piece. Instead of being surrounded by modern ruins of buildings, the piece is not cleaned up and framed.

Discovered last weekend, the stenciled work shows a forlorn boy holding a can of red paint next to the words “I remember when all this was trees.” But by Tuesday, artists from the 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios, a feisty grassroots group, had excavated the 7-by-8-foot, 1,500-pound cinder block wall with a masonry saw and forklift and moved the piece to their grounds near the foot of the Ambassador Bridge in southwest Detroit.
The move -- a guerilla act on top of Banksy’s initial guerilla act -- has sparked an intense debate about the nature of graffiti art, including complicated questions of meaning, legality, value and ownership. Some say the work should be protected and preserved at all costs. Others say that no one had a right to move it — and that the power and meaning of graffiti art is so intrinsic to its location that to relocate it is to kill it.

Sydney doesn't have art galleries that take the street art, they just paint over it instead.