A New Aesthetic

Damn the Fashionistas!

How do we lessen advertising’s grip on culture?

Damn the Fashionistas!

It would be all too easy to fly into an indignant, leftist rage at the sight of a wan model dressed in luxury shopping bags and splayed out next to garbage cans. But that’s probably the exact reaction W magazine was banking on with its “homeless chic” pictorial. Fashion advertising is increasingly driven by the dialectic between salacious imagery and moral outrage. Something so absurd as the W spread, in which destitution has never looked so glamorous, seems more like a culture jam – an effort to subvert the advertising – than advertising itself. But advertising, like a virus, is always evolving. It has appropriated absurdity in an attempt to render itself immune to subversion. And now people who see the magazine will break into two camps – those who think its reprehensible and those who think its fabulous. Those two sides will argue, keeping W exactly where it wants to be - in the spotlight. So anyone truly concerned with lessening advertising’s grip on culture will have to figure out not how to subvert this kind of ad, but how to jam the dialectic it feeds on. How do we do that? How can we jam the ad industry and the fashionistas?

– Sarah Nardi

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NYC artists combat illegal street advertising.

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Ji Lee – pleaseenjoy.com

Last month, dozens of New York artists and activists battled the clutter of consumerism in a guerrilla-style billboard takeover. Mobilized by Jordan Seiler and the Public Ad Campaign, the 24-hour direct action replaced nearly 19,000 square feet of illegal advertising with original, anti-corporate street art.

Blueprints for the ambitious aesthetic revolution took shape years ago, when Seiler found that thousands of New York’s posters and billboards were not properly licensed. Some ads, he discovered, violated bylaws that have been on city books since the 1940s.

“Outdoor advertising is the primary obstacle to open public communications,”Seiler explains on his website, publicadcampaign.com. “Through bold acts of civil disobedience we hope to air our grievances in the court of public opinion and witness our communities regain control of the space they occupy.”

Armed with paint rollers, spray cans and video equipment, activists took to the streets on April 25th wearing florescent orange construction vests. (Covertness, it seemed, was not a top priority). The mixed brigade of culture jammers — ranging from artists and architects to software developers and bio-physicists — swiftly whitewashed 126 of the offending advertisements.

Calling themselves the Municipal Landscape Control Committee, the team turned the newly-buffed billboards into multimedia art. Across Manhattan, walls that formerly peddled electronics, designer clothes and alcohol were reclaimed in the name of peace, laughter and high-fives.

For a fleeting moment, it seemed democracy itself had burst through New York’s thick clouds of visual pollution. Instead of noisy and intrusive ads, passersby freely engaged with refreshing open-source canvasses. It was an artful and symbolic warning aimed at billboard companies that unlawfully reap profits from citizen-owned spaces.

Unsurprisingly, the artistic uprising was not without casualties. One artist, two whitewashers and a videographer were arrested by New York police — one of whom is still fighting criminal charges. And, because of the city’s utter lack of enforcement, many of the same illegal ads were replaced the very next day.

Such flagrant disregard for the quality and character of public space has been met with passionate outrage across the globe. In places like Los Angeles, Toronto and Paris, creative communities are developing new ways to investigate billboards and combat illegal advertisements.

The omnipresence of insipid "buy me" schlock isn't exclusive to the world's metropolises. Indeed, the battle for a clear and democratic mindscape can be fought and won at all fronts. Visit illegalsigns.ca or illegalbillboards.org and learn how you can take back the streets in your hometown.

Business Casual in Fashion for G20 Summit

Banks are closing for the duration of the G20 summit and London professionals are being urged to dress down for the occasion.

Amidst gathering storm clouds of potentially violent protest, police in London have issued a grim warning to attendees of the approaching G20 summit: don’t dress like bankers. Flaunting one’s wealth, it seems, is seriously démodé.
The Edinburgh mansion of Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was vandalized this week after it was revealed that he received a $24 million pension after quitting RBS, a bank so burdened by bad investments that it required a $50 million taxpayer bailout to prevent its collapse. A statement issued to media by unknown sources after the attack explained, “We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless.”
“This is just the beginning,” the statement warned.
A professor of anthropology at the University of East London was later suspended from his position for allegedly attempting to incite violence during an interview given last week in which he warned that the G20 summit could see “bankers hanging from lampposts.”
Protest at the summit, slated to being April 1, is widely speculated to be the most organized and well-orchestrated effort in years. Protestors plan to converge on the Bank of England from four sides, each group lead by one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Its no wonder that in the face of this potential mayhem, several London banks have decided to shutter for the duration of the summit and financial professionals are being urged to look like anything other than what they really are.
The impetus for violence against those individuals responsible for this mess – while certainly understandable – simply cannot be condoned. Banks closing and bankers being forced to wear different clothes is undoubtedly emboldening G20 protestors, but the fact that the threat of protest is capable of levying such effect indicates that this is an opportunity for real, sustainable change. Should the G20 deteriorate into violence, the mission will be undermined and the protestors dismissed as criminals. So if its true upheaval we want, let’s be sure to wear velvet to the revolution.

Blog: Did Fairey Steal The Magic?

He may not owe AP anything, but that doesn't mean the image is his alone.

Amid the thicket of legal issues surrounding the recent Shepard Fairey/Associated Press dispute over rights to the iconic "Hope" image, I can't help but think that we seem to have missed a fairly simply point. Fairey may not owe the AP anything, but he certainly owes the photographer responsible for the image something. I'm not talking about a cut of the profits or shared ownership of the rights – just an acknowledgment of the artist who originally captured Obama in that moment.

When I finally saw the two images side by side – the photograph, taken by photographer Mannie Garcia and Fairey's subsequent interpretation of it – I was struck by how little the original had actually been altered. Though Fairey's attorney contends that Fairey only used the photo as a reference and transformed it into "a stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that created powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message," the transcendent solemnity that gives the image its power is fully evident in the original photograph.

Fairey may have had the vision to immortalize the image, but it was Garcia who had the prescience to immortalize the moment. Why did it take a lawsuit for this photograph and its provenance to become public knowledge? If Fairey's talent as an artist lies within his ability to abstract and idealize existing imagery, then why is he so unwilling to openly reference his sources? In this case, I think Fairey should have given credit where credit is due and that he should have done so long before lawyers became involved.

Feb 10, 2009: This post has been updated.

Poster Boy

The 27-year-old Brooklyn artist was arrested on Saturday.

A rising star in the underground scene, the artist known as Poster Boy was arrested at an event in SoHo on Saturday. The 27 year-old Brooklyn resident was apprehended by plain clothes officers who were tipped off to the artist’s presence by fliers advertising the event. The arrest marked the culmination of a months-long search for the elusive subway artist. There’s only one problem. The man officers arrested, Henry Matyjewicz, isn’t Poster Boy. A source quoted by the New York Times claims that Matyjewicz is a legal artist whose role is to propagate the ideals of the Poster Boy movement. “Henry Matyjewicz,” insists the source, “is innocent.” For those who haven’t heard of him, Poster Boy is an anti-consumerist guerilla artist commonly hailed as New York’s answer to Banksy. But unlike the enigmatic Brit, Poster Boy attacks consumer culture head-on, targeting the myriad advertisements that litter the city’s subway tunnels. Wielding a razor blade and a wit equally as sharp, the artist removes and recombines elements of self-adhesive posters to create subversive “mash-ups” of corporate ads. After spending a few minutes with Poster Boy, an ad for the film Iron Man reads Iran = Nam and a Puma spot featuring Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt is fitted with the slogan McEndorse the World. And though his work has drawn considerable attention and praise since appearing on the scene nearly a year ago, Poster Boy has no intention of capitalizing on his fame. “I want people to know that this can exist,” he says in a documentary produced by People We Love. “An artist can make art that doesn’t have to be justified through an institution.” Unlike other street artists that have assimilated into the mainstream, for Poster Boy there will be no copyright, no authorship, no galleries and no private collections. As an artist, he claims, he is uninterested in “making things for bored rich people to hang above their couch.” Sources close to the artist maintain that there are, in fact, multiple “Poster Boys” presently engaged in the project which would explain why Matyjewicz took the fall in SoHo on Saturday. As all culture jammers know, any viable movement must transcend the individual. When it comes to Poster Boy, I hope he inspires legions.

Ad Industry Fouls Again

The Super Bowl commercials are known for being clever and innovative, but this year's crop appeals to our basest instincts.

The universally tepid response to yesterday’s lineup of Super Bowl ads indicates that we’ve come to expect a certain degree of innovation from advertisers who drop millions to purchase game-time spots (remember  “1984” Apple ad directed by Ridley Scott ?).

But in light of the economic downturn and increasing financial woes, advertisers chose to play it safe this year, foregoing any auteur-driven cultural watersheds for crotch humor and talking babies. Although always absurd, the price of Super Bowl spots is particularly outrageous this year ($3 million for 30 seconds) and advertisers clearly didn’t want to take any chances. So they appealed to our base nature (guy taking a snow globe to the groin, giant fake breasts) and our sentimentality (horsey love story, dog adoptions).

Pepsi even tried to rewrite history by casting what was in fact Richard Nixon's preferred drink as the nectar that unified the counter-culture (with an assist from Bob Dylan who now joins Dennis Hopper in the ranks of anti-establishment icons cum celebrity establishment endorsers). I was curious to see how this gluttonous capitalist ritual would be handled at a time when capitalism is teetering on the brink. After yesterday, I have my answer. Advertisers chose to speak to us like we’re idiots and hoped that we would be so distracted by that poor guy’s crotch, that we’d sit back, crack a Pepsi and keep on buying this shit.

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