You will look no more!

Less than four months ago I wrote about some graffiti I had spotted above a sandwich shop in Chicago.  Recently I happened to pass the same way and noticed that the graffiti has been painted over.

Four months ago:

This month:

Presumably the building owner decided to “clean up” the place by painting it over. It got me to thinking about the transient nature of illegal graffiti. Does that make it more valuable to the graffiti artist, or less?

Would other works of art be more treasured if they only lasted a couple of months, or would people care for them less?  How would you feel about making a trip to see the Mona Lisa if you knew that in a couple months it’d be painted over by a cleaning crew?