The artist who created the “Rainbow Vomit” mural, as neighborhood jokesters have dubbed the nine-story “The Illuminated Mural” by Katherine Craig on the side of the Detroit Storage Co. building in Milwaukee Junction, has filed suit against the building's owners.



According to this article in Crain’s Craig's lawsuit asserts...
"…the mural is in danger because Princeton Enterprises, whose founder and CEO is Matt Lester, put the building up for auction last year [[it did not sell) and has considered redeveloping the Albert Kahn-designed building into multifamily housing.

“Princeton … has threatened to destroy or mutilate the mural by, for example, punching windows across the painted façade,” the lawsuit says.

“Princeton has asked Craig to accept little more than a token sum in exchange for her legal rights to an artwork that took more than a year to conceptualize and create, and that continues to be the most important part of her growing oeuvre.”

The lawsuit says Craig received $33,000 in funding from the College for Creative Studies Community + Public Arts: Detroit program for the project.

The Visual Artists Rights Act allows visual artists to protect their work from “any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of that work which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation.”
Threatened? Since nothing has been done to the building I am having difficulty understanding what the suit is about. What are the damages?
But the lawsuit is likely premature, said Andrey Tomkiw of Royal Oak-based Tomkiw Mackewich PLC. That’s because it has not yet been established that the mural is “in danger” because Princeton Enterprises has not yet determined what it specifically it will do with the building —sell it or redevelop it.
Tempest in a teapot? Attention grab? Or valid artistic argument?