Yesterday LA artist Saber hired five jet planes to skywrite with smoke over City Hall and downtown Los Angeles. He used this new approach to write his name and fellows artists and crews, like Revok, Tempt, MSK, LTS, Risky, Ayer and Dream, and also to convey his message which says Art is not a crime. End mural moratorium: twitter at end mural moratorium. With this 45min lasting action saber tries to bring awareness to the recent city’s efforts to ban public art and having it removed by using the money of taxpayers. The city of LA spends +10.000.000US$ to stop graffiti, but none to support legal mural programs. Furthermore, there has been a huge dispute about the practices of private graffiti removal companies, who sometimes illegally break into private property to cover commissioned murals by established artists such as Os Gemeos or Retna. The documentary Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression, released in cinemas worldwide last month, covers these illegal techniques and their practitioners, who essentially use graffiti to fight graffiti, in depth.

Saber, well-known for executing the world’s largest graffiti piece in 1997, furthermore claims, that the city is threatening owners of small businesses with fines if they don’t remove the murals painted on their stores, and therefore trying to earn money on graffiti by yet another method.

> more about the petition here

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(via arrestedmotion.com, lataco.com)