The story so far: someone put up a four-metre weatherboard tower with a water tank on the corner of Hargraves and Mostyn Streets last Monday.

No-one fessed up and it’s since been demolished out of fears for public safety. It is possible that one or two ‘creative’ folk are chortling, believing they have sparked a public discussion.

But really, that discussion’s been going on forever. Remember Ron Robertson-Swann’s Vault?

It was placed in Melbourne’s City Square in 1980. Even the artist referred to it as The Thing, and construction crews called it Steelhenge.

Most of us still know it as The Yellow Peril. It has wandered all over Melbourne and now sits outside the Centre for Contemporary Art at Southbank and is now officially listed as ‘historically important’ to Melbourne.

Then there’s Banksy. The anonymous British graffiti artist used to be called a public nuisance and a vandal, but his works now sell for almost half a million dollars.

One Banksy work in a Melbourne lane was destroyed by plumbers replacing a pipe and another was accidentally painted over by Melbourne City Council workers.

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But is it art? Banksy’s stuff is usually (but not always) loved because of its whimsy, satire and hit-and-run methods. Most graffiti is self-infatuated, dull, ugly, repetitive ‘tagging’ and costs taxpayers a fortune.

One which passed the public test, to our mind anyway, was a giant peace symbol painted on a blank concrete wall in a railway shunting yard. It was there for years when someone added a metre-high caption: International Year of the Steering Wheel. It cheered up millions of commuters.

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We were still a little foggy about this organisation which calls itself SC3 and consulted wise old Dr Google. It said: “A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt Learn more”. We’re not sure if the last two words were an order or an invitation.