One of the murals painted by street artist Lushsux in Hosier Lane, Melbourne, after council workers censored it on Wednesday morning. Credit:Dean Sunshine The reclusive Lushsux was the only Australian included in Banksy's recent Dismaland pop-up "bemusement park" in the seaside resort town of Weston-super-Mare, England. "He's got skills with a spray can," says Sunshine, who has had his own run-ins with council censorship over the Kama Sutra Burger mural he commissioned for the side of his fabric warehouse on Victoria Street in Brunswick. "He has one foot in the graffiti world, one foot in street art, and he understands both worlds and can survive in both." His most recent works, however, have not survived unscathed. A mural of Kim Kardashian in Cremorne painted about 10 days ago has been repeatedly attacked, even though Lushsux placed a video camera to capture vandals in the act. Paint was thrown and the word "slut" scrawled across it.

A second iteration of the Kardashian mural in Sydney has fared rather better, but the two nudes in Hosier Lane, unveiled on Wednesday morning, barely made it through the coffee crush before being censored by council contractors armed with tins of paint and rather limited artistic talent. By 9.30am, the nipples were gone, replaced on one of the murals with a suitably modest but rather one-dimensional tank top. One of the murals after the crack team of Genital Removal Experts had done their work. The subject of that painting, Peggy Sue Winters, was disappointed with the council's intervention. "I feel that censoring my body is taking away my ability to present myself in the way I want," said the nude model and dancer.

"It's all too common for female bodies to be commodified and objectified in our society, but when a woman takes control of that it's deemed unacceptable and confronting. The Kim Kardashian scenario is a prime example of that. "I hope that this culture of censoring and slut-shaming ends sooner rather than later, and I'm glad more and more people are taking a stand and helping to bring this issue into light." See her social media post of the image here. The City of Melbourne, however, sees it purely in terms of what it deems acceptable in a public place. "Hosier Lane is an iconic public space and we need to strike a balance to ensure that all members of our city can enjoy the public art on display," a council spokesman said.

"In this case, our contractors censored the images based on Council's street art guidelines. These guidelines correspond with the Australian Public Broadcasting guidelines for nudity in advertising and public places." The council's graffiti management plan frames the notion of acceptability with reference to the fact that it is a criminal offence in Victoria to "create offensive graffiti that is visible from a public place if that graffiti would offend a reasonable person". The second mural, before censorship... ...and after. (All images: Dean Sunshine)

Of course, one person's reasonable is another's prudish, and Dean Sunshine for one can't see why anyone would have an issue with images of nudity in a public place. "Really, you go to the NGV, you'll see nipples, heaps of them," he said. "In this day and age that sort of censorship is ridiculous." Lushsux similarly argues that the murals are part of a long tradition in fine art. "It's an update on the old thing of getting a model to stand in one place for 10 hours while you paint her on canvas in the nude in a dingy Parisian studio," he told Fairfax.

"But instead of all that drama, the model can just DM a nude and after that I can then paint it on a wall." What happens next, of course, is where the real drama lies. Karl Quinn is on Facebook and on twitter @karlkwin