http://www.salon.com/2017/01/27/blood-and-gore-brussels-asks-how-far-street-art-can-go/

Blood and gore: Brussels asks how far street art can go

BRUSSELS (AP) — A struggling child with a blade to his neck awaiting slaughter. A gutted body hanging upside down as blood seeps out. In Brussels these days, it’s called street art — and names far less flattering.

“Hellish and awful,” Nicole Brisard grumbled as she walked her dog, Max, past the bleeding corpse rendered in paint on seven stories of a low-rent apartment building. “And all we wish for is to have something better, out of respect for the people.”

The two murals that appeared last weekend have made their anonymous artist the talk of the European capital, posing a familiar question about art expressly created to provoke: how far can it go before the outrage becomes unacceptable?

Both the wall painting eliciting Brisard’s ire and the companion mural across town of a child facing death are oversized adaptations of details from well-known 17th century art works, “The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers” by Dutch master Jan de Baen and Caravaggio’s “Sacrifice of Isaac.”

The originals, respectively based on a historical, political murder and the Old Testament, are held by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and the equally hallowed Uffizi in Florence.

Some parents in the grimy, gentrifying neighborhood where the basketball court-sized mural of Isaac howling in fear is located have complained that children are having trouble sleeping because of the terrifying sight outside their windows.

“Lots of parents would not like that,” Brussels alderwoman Ans Persoons said.

It is almost as shocking to think they were painted on a few bitterly cold nights in Brussels while dangling down a rope and staying out of sight of authorities.

The mural depicting a lynched De Witt brother can be seen far and wide, including by hundreds of thousands of commuters on Belgium’s busiest stretch of railway.

Many art insiders suspect the painter behind the murals is the same one who created huge frescoes of human genitalia a few months ago.