Paint that a shame

Proving no good deed aimed at graffiti artists goes unpunished, a federal appeals panel just upheld a $6.75 million judgment against a developer who gave spraypainters permission to tag to high heaven his Long Island City building, then whitewashed the murals before building housing on the site.

It is a frontal assault on property rights that Jerry Wolkoff, who let artists turn a derelict warehouse into the visual playground known as 5Pointz — allowing vandalism that would otherwise be illegal — is on the hook for millions in damages because he ultimately decided to knock down the edifice.

The Visual Artists Rights Act is meant to prevent the destruction of public art without 90 days’ notice. It would have been nice if Wolkoff, who was well aware of the murals’ significance, had given artists the chance to document or preserve their work at their own expense. (Though, lord knows, plenty of pictures survived.)

He made another decision, and an understandable one. After all, taggers had already painted atop one another’s work many times over. Wolkoff merely added a final coat of white paint atop countless layers of creative defacement.

The devilish problem now is extrapolating the ruling’s logic to other cases. Like the 999 out of 1,000 instances in which a building owner — or, in the case of a bridge or school, the public — didn’t invite graffiti and can’t tell whether it’s of what the law calls “recognized stature.”

What’s a building owner supposed to do, consult with a curator before ordering a cleanup?