When soccer fans converge on Dallas this month for World Cup games, the aesthetically inclined ones will encounter a city home to art museums, galleries, and public art. And yet, the city will be missing a major and longstanding public artwork, after a conservationist artist’s beloved mural was painted over in May.
Florida-based artist Robert Wyland has filed a $25 million federal lawsuit against FIFA and the owners of the building where his mural had appeared for a quarter-century, who, he says, painted over Ocean Life (1999), one of a hundred murals he painted around the world to raise consciousness about marine pollution and conservation efforts. The eight-story-high, 17,000-square-foot mural showed endangered humpback whales and dolphins and other marine life.
Why would you do that?
It’s all the more appalling given the ugliness of everything else in that photo. I count at least nine nasty-ugly buildings plus a nasty-ugly parking lot full of boring cars. The mural is the only pleasing thing to look at in that entire swath of urban landscape. Why destroy it to promote a temporary football contest?
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