As Marilyn Monroe famously sang, "Diamonds are a girl's best friend." But a recent addition to the art world is claiming that the sparkly rocks are also "A Man's Worst Enemy."
Local street artist, ABOVE, revealed a new mural in Johannesburg, South Africa, proclaiming the potential danger of diamonds as man's greatest foe with the slogan: "Diamonds are a girl's best friend and a man's worst enemy."
Not only is the mural huge, it is painted on the external wall of one of South Africa's biggest diamond exporters.
ABOVE somehow convinced Jewel City -- Johannesburg's biggest name in the diamond business -- to let him paint the wall of its business. Little did the owners know what the actual result would be.
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"I was inspired to make this piece by the simple fact that I was in Johannesburg, South Africa and had access to Jewel City's massive wall," ABOVE told the Huffington Post. "These two great factors greatly inspired me to make a social and political word play about the blood diamond trade that had so ravished different countries in Africa."
The street artist painted the mural in order to protest 'blood diamonds' and Jewel City is the largest diamond exporter in the entire Southern Hemisphere.
"Africa has a really bad history with this conflict and I had the ability to broadcast this topic to a larger audience. I felt it was my duty to make this word play given the opportunity I had to paint specifically on Jewel City," said ABOVE.
ABOVE described the recent heist on his website:
The next day I had started painting but what the owners didn't know is that I lied to them and was hijacking their wall. [...] I assume the owners were too busy trading diamonds inside the mega centre they never took the time to come out and see I was painting a controversial word play about the diamond trade and how it's fueled so much bloodshed in wars making it one of man's worst enemies.
ABOVE is not new to the world of controversial art. Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street Movement he hanged a banker effigy from a telephone wire in Miami last October, accompanied by a play on a Karl Marx quote, "Give a Wall St. banker enough rope and he will hang himself".
Think the message could have come across a little clearer? Scroll through these pictures of the mural and then let us know what you think in the comments section below:
