Cash For Your Warhol

As per usual my Monday started with a computer malfunction so this post is gonna be light. As mentioned on the NYSAT microsite Why Donate page, we are starting a very small granting program called Under One Hundred. We will be putting out an official call for submissions, which we will take on an ongoing basis, in the next few weeks. The above project done by Geoff Hargadon in Boston is a wonderful example of something we would consider for Under One Hundred. As of yet Geoff has only installed this ad takeover in Boston and here at PublicAdCampaign we would love to see it come to New York. Look for the first Under One Hundred from I AM and PosterChild in late February.

Can a Rebel Stay a Rebel Without the Claws?

The review below, of the recent Shepard Fairey exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, is pretty vicious. After praising Mr. Fairey's aesthetics, this quote "Despite its rousing first impact, the exhibition leaves you with a sense of dismay at the devolution of a certain avant-garde dream into a kind of visual easy listening for the college-educated masses." places Mr. Johnson's opinions more concretely. Arguing that the work has lost it's political punch, Johnson asks "Does anyone not realize that capitalism is contradictory? Is anyone’s world really rocked by something that can’t be immediately categorized? Every day we are swamped with images and ideas that pretend to confound conventional thinking. That’s popular culture."

In many ways I agree with Mr. Johnson in that I think people have absorbed a lot of the ideas behind the Initial Obey campaign. Alternative methods of relating to our environment and questioning our social and political agendas through serendipitous moments and ambiguous gestures are old hat. What we need from our street artists are active political gestures which shape thinking and disseminate ideas as opposed to create confusion in hopes of shaking things up. As amazingly beautiful as this billboard is, without being put up illegally it has no agenda other than beautification of our environment which just isn't progressive enough these days.

This says nothing about the recent collaboration being done with Saks. Oh Shep, I know this ones for charity too and I'm usually on your side, but this rubs me the wrong way.

By Ken Johnson from The New York Times

BOSTON — You will be seeing a lot more art by Shepard Fairey on the streets of New York this spring. But it won’t be in the form of the illegal guerrilla strikes he has been committing since his days as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design 20 years ago, nor anything like his famous Obama Hope poster. For starters, it is in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, for whom he has also designed swanky red, white and black Russian Constructivist-style limited-edition shopping bags.[Read More]

Shepard Fairey Does Boston

I'm pretty sure these are being done legally, especially since Shep was arrested in Boston not too long ago on the night of his opening at the ICA. Either way his work is beautiful and provides a wonderful contrast to the advertising seen in some of these images.

VIA Juxtapoz

ad, graffiti… what’s the difference?

VIA under-covered

Posted on February 13, 2009 by under-covered

Answer: The difference is obviously whose paying for that space in the public eye. In lay terms, money. But in the last few weeks there has been a lot of push-back to renew the debate.

In the last few weeks there has been a flurry of activity around the question of advertising’s role in our environment and who has the right to project messages to the masses.

New York City’s well-known metro ad-altering trickster Poster Boy was caught — but not really. Fact is, there are hundreds of poster boys out there and the police — who arrived at an art opening flagrantly advertising his appearance busted someone and claimed to have captured Mr. Poster Boy himself.

Police in Boston captured a more tangible suspect – Shepard Fairey — when they also arrived at his opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art where a retrospective is being shown in his honor.

In both cases the culprit is actually unknown. It’s anyone’s guess who put up the “obey” signs in Boston — Fairey has been around for so long and accrued such a following that any fledgling anti-addies with a library card or internet access could print out and slap up their own ‘obey’ signs. More obviously, Poster Boy is not one arrest-able citizen but many creative, albeit mischievous, metro-riders who are sick of seeing (on average) 5,000 ads per day… And started talking back.

One cunning blogger is Boston put it well on Universal Hub when she/he wrote,

“The whole point of the ‘Obey’ campaign is that it’s viral; that Fairey himself has no control over who uses the images or where they’re placed.” — Cynic

And, predictably, there’s always the narrative of the peeved cop who wants to keep order and make a show of dragging the ‘bad guy’ in and set an example (or at least frighten the next generation of anti-addies). Instead, in both clunky cases, the police were regarded by the locals as brutes. Party poopers. And as for those young street artists — as one ICA patron put it,

“It makes him even more of a hero to me. The fact that he is arrested for his art shows that it is meaningful to him and he cares about what he is doing.” — Ginny Delany, 27 in the Boston Globe

The meaning of contributing to your environment — to change what you find wrong or unhealthy in your neighborhood — is the catapult for these “viral” images. And the active anti-ad, street art movement (not new, by any means) will further force the question, what are ads and what is graffiti?

Here’s a fitting answer by a couple of New York City artists: