Well, they were just doing their job. A cleaner in London destroyed Banksy’s latest pandemic-inspired artwork on an Underground train—apparently without realizing its significance. On his Instagram page Tuesday, the secretive artist posted a video showing that he’d boarded a Tube carriage to paint a mural of sneezing rats. However, on Monday the Evening Standard reported that, rather than finding some way of preserving the potentially very valuable work, it was removed just like any other form of common graffiti would be. An unnamed source at Transport for London said: “When we saw the video, we started to look into it and spoke to the cleaners. It started to emerge that they had noticed some sort of ‘rat thing’ a few days ago and cleaned it off, as they should.” The anonymous statement appeared to shift blame on to the cleaners after the transport provider was accused of “cultural vandalism” for removing the Banksy work.
