Building owners are making a fortune from Banksy’s art

Featured on nypost.com

Early last month, residents of Midwood woke up to a pair of new neighborhood beautification projects.

At the corner of Coney Island Avenue and Avenue I, an empty single-story building suddenly sported an anti-gentrification mural: the silhouette of a suit-clad real-estate developer wielding a jagged graph line — the kind associated with rising stock prices — as people ran ahead of him, as if being chased. Next door, an abandoned gas station boasted a painting of a seal balancing a red-orange ball that was once part of a Mobil logo.

Rumors circulated that the art was done by Banksy, the notorious, anonymous, UK-based street artist who has splashed politically charged images upon walls from Bethlehem, West Bank, to Liverpool, England. Finally, on March 19, a message on Banksy’s Instragram — 2.1 million followers strong — confirmed that he (the artist is widely believed to be a man) had created it. But other questions remained unanswered: Who really owns the works — and should anyone be able to make money from them?

In a world where Banksy street-pieces — essentially, illegally created public art — cut from buildings can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars, proprietary domain is a hot-button issue. Legally, according to attorney Eric Baum, who represented artists in litigation involving the 5 Pointz mural space in Long Island City, “The owner of the building can sell [or keep] the artwork.” And, he adds, the property owner can also destroy it.

Such was the case when a Banksy-rendered Mickey and Minnie Mouse was ripped off of a billboard in Los Angeles and tossed in the trash in 2011. Pieces can also be hidden away (a Coney Island landlord keeps a gate pulled down to conceal a 2013 Banksy painting of a robot) or sold to the highest bidder.

When Evan Franca, a restaurateur who lives in Prospect Heights, saw the images of the Midwood works on Banksy’s Instagram account, he decided to get in on the action.

The businessman rendering had been painted over by unknown parties. But “I really liked the [seal] piece,” Franca, 33, told The Post. “So I reached out to the owners [of the building] to let them know what they have. They told me they were demolishing the building in a couple weeks. They’re planning to build a storage facility on the property.

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