Not everybody used Art Basel week to show their appreciation of art. A couple of losers used Miami and its signature art event as a platform to send us a giant "Fuck You" when they vandalized a wall mural at Vagabond last week. They wrote "Fuck Basel" over the mural and included their respective graffiti tags on December 2, the first day of Art Basel.
But it'll take more than a couple of nitwits with some spray paint to quash Miami's high after another successful Basel. And to prove it, the artist who originally painted the mural titled "Transcendental Vagabonds" in 2008, Gerry Stecca, agreed to come in and retouch his mural starting today.
The mural is a tribute to Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and Henry David Thoreau and Vagabond reps say they hope Stecca's restoration should be complete by the weekend. As for the criminals who vandalized the mural, they didn't exactly slink back into obscurity. Closed circuit cameras captured close up images of one of their faces.
The image of the tagger defacing the Vagabond mural was posted on a Facebook page and there is rampant speculation over who the vandals were and what they were trying to prove. A couple of commenters claimed that those responsible were from a New York guerilla art collective and they go as far as to name the individual, but so far there is little known for sure.
The vandalization of Vagabond mural is one of a couple of negative aspects of the recently passed Art Basel. Earlier this week, some of the Pink Snails installation on Miami Beach were dumped into Biscayne Bay.
