A Project Salvages and Installs No-Cost Payphones to Revive a Fading Technology

VIA: Hyperallergic

DETROIT — One of the authenticating moves that anchored the 2005 movie Brick in the neo-noir genre was the omnipresence of payphones as the means of telephonic communication. Even as cell phones have outdated the maintenance of landlines in the home, we still pantomime the technology of archaic dialing patterns and receivers, indicating that in our mobile-technology era, there is something fundamental about payphones. The Portland, Oregon-based artist Karl Anderson would tend to agree. More [HERE]

Guerrilla Girls Target MoMA Trustees With Ties to Jeffrey Epstein in an Ad Takeover

VIA: Hyperallergic

“Advice to the Museum of Modern Art about BIG donors with BIG ties to Jeffery Epstein,” reads a poster that appeared on a phone booth across the street from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan this past weekend. It continued: “MoMA should Kick Leon Black & Glenn Dubin off its Board immediately, drape the Black and Dubin Galleries in black, & put up wall labels explaining why.” The ad is signed by the veteran activist group Guerrilla Girls, who added their signature gorilla mask logo at the bottom of the poster. “The Guerrilla Girls volunteer to help write those labels,” the group adds. More [HERE]

The Clandestine Cultural Knowledge of Ancient Graffiti

It is interesting to think of a time when urban scrawl was less an offense and more a part of the everyday. It reminds us that the invention of outdoor advertising as it pertains to public infrastructure has drastically altered our cities by creating a vast network of privatized sacred space untouchable to the normal citizen. This sacred space makes anything outside its boundaries profane, an unintelligent interruption to the ordered logic of a public environment where messages have their rightful real estate and anything else is an intrusion.

It makes me think that while there may not be a direct connection, the distance between the urban neglect and lack of investment in our cities and the invention of the JCDecaeux model of privately financed public infrastructure paid for by advertising isn't far. Neoliberal policies that favor privatization have always taken advantage of our sites of degeneration to maximize profits. Take gentrification as a prime example. Neighborhoods that are neglected over many years have depressed values and thus maximal profit potential for investors who guise thier wealth extraction as regeneration.

The same goes for the outdoor advertising world. lack of investment in the public environment in general, and more specifically bus shelter infrastructure created an opportunity for wealth extraction. We will "regenerate" this space and in the process create an unprecedented opportunity for profit. Some 50 years after the JCD models invention, talk of undoing the relationship between public infrastructure and advertising is almost unheard of an a long stretch for even the most liberal of voices.

VIA: Hyperallergic

Saqqara is an ancient Egyptian site that was used for burials over thousands of years. Of these, the most famous is the Step Pyramid of Djoser (a king of Egypt’s Third Dynasty) built roughly 4,700 years ago. Visit there today and one of the things you might see, in a building near the Step Pyramid, is a room with glass that protects an inscription. Not any ordinary inscription, this is actually tourist graffiti. Why protect graffiti? As it happens, this example of graffiti was left by a tourist at the site over 3,000 years ago. More [HERE]

NYC Kiosks Invite Artists to Pay Nearly $1,000 to Show Their Work

Another Pay to Play Opportunity for Art in Public Spaces. RJ Rushmore of AiAP writes for Hyperallergic about the New MVOV campaign on LINK NYC.

RJ does as a great job calling out MVOV and the absurdity of paying a gatekeeper to use our shared public spaces. Often the inclusion of art into the commercial space that we call public space is an opportunity for some commercial enterprise and this example is not different. Usually art and artists are used to give respectability to public space land grabs by consumerist ideologies but this example is just straight profiteering. You want to see your work in public space? Do like the rest of us and pay up.

LinkNYC, the “communications network” of digital advertising displays disguised as WiFi hotspots on New York City streets, has gotten into the artwashing game. Artists are being asked to pay to play in what is marketed as an open call for art in public space. More [HERE]

A Campaign to Replace Public Ads with Art Lives on as a Book and an Exhibition

VIA: Hyperallergic

It’s been just over a year since the launch of Art in Ad Places, a guerrilla project to replace a small fraction of the flotsam of display advertising filling the New York cityscape with art. Now that the 52-week public service campaign has run its course, an exhibition of photographs of the public art project shot by street art photographer Luna Park, and an accompanying book, will ensure that the ephemeral project endures. More [HERE]

Artist Sells Off Ad Space on a Rauschenberg to Destroy It

VIA: Hyperallergic

Artist Nikolas Bentel is on a mission to destroy an original Robert Rauschenberg in a project intended to emphasize how the art market is, in his words, “a glorified stock market.” Beginning this week, the artist — who is part of the New Museum-led incubator New Inc. — is selling off sections of the artwork as advertising space, so its surface will eventually be covered with an eclectic assortment of images.
More [HERE]

I wrote the following Hyperallergic article about the recent Subvertisers International week of action. The text was inspired by Luna Park's amazing photos of the NYC portion of the international event. Luna is the only photographer I know going out of her way to point her camera at the subvertising/ad-takeover movement. I cannot thank her enough for her continued interest in the political nature of the work and our sincere attempts to bring this small but significant issue to the forefront of our collective consciousness. I think she, like many other public/street/graffiti artists, see the value in having a public space that feels rich with voices and is worth diving into headlong with your eyes wide open.

Since this article is short, it talks a big game while leaving a lot to be said another time. One day I will try to write a long form essay that delves deeper into the many issues surrounding this work, its history, intention, and efficacy. Until then please enjoy this attempt to quickly put some perspective in place.

VIA: Hyperallergic

More [HERE]

A Guerrilla Campaign Is Replacing Ads with Art Around New York City

2017 is looking to be a great year already with the launch of AiAP (Art in Ad Places). RJ Rushmore and Caroline Caldwell have spearheaded an ambitious yearlong project that aims to make a sustained critique of outdoor advertising and its deleterious effects a part of our day to day conversations. I will wait till the project is further along to give my full analysis and critique, (reserved for the deserving and not meant to come off punitively) but suffice to say I am very excited about what they are doing and have high hopes for their unique approach to bringing this issue to the forefront of public consciousness. Having spoken to both of RJ and Caroline before this project began to take shape, I know there will be some heavy hitters joining the fray by participating in AiAP and I look forward to hearing the reasons they have lent thier work to such a potentially contentious issue. Until then, keep your eyes on the work of these two activist curators and expect the ad takeover movement in New York to see a renewed interest and vigor. 

VIA: Hyperallergic

Art in Ad Places will install a new work by a different artist in a payphone kiosk every week this year.
As flowers bloomed last spring, a billboard advertising $1,000 off a Brazilian butt lift popped up outside artist Caroline Caldwell’s Brooklyn apartment. It pictured a giant, airbrushed ass in a skimpy bikini against a beach background — an image Caldwell had to look at every day. “I laughed it off at first, but the billboard was designed to make me feel self-conscious, and I got tired of it,” Caldwell told Hyperallergic. “I became determined to fill my life with art that would make people feel anything else.” More [HERE]

Mississippi Governor Decries Billboard by Artist-Led Super PAC

VIA: Hyperallergic

The artist-led For Freedoms super PAC has erected a billboard on Highway 80 outside Pearl, Mississippi that features President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s slogan “Make American Great Again” atop a well-known Civil Rights-era photograph by Spider Martin of a confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. More [HERE]

How Selective Enforcement of Illegal Advertising Laws Punishes Creative Activism

VIA: Hyperallergic

The enforcement of city and state law pertaining to graffiti, advertising, and other signage has enormous power to visually shape public space. In New York City, enforcement is heavily skewed to ignore illegal commercial advertising, while simultaneously aggressively targeting graffiti and, in some cases, symbols of dissent. More [HERE]

In Bushwick, Street Art Comes with a Copious Side of Advertising Billboards

Everyone asked for comment in this article, including myself have something interesting to say. On a compete side note, I wish writers would let you know that they may quote entire sections of your emails verbatim. I always assume they will integrate your ideas into a story and so often whatever grammatically deficient gibberish i spew out in an email on the plane home from Germany ends up as a quote. :)

VIA: Hyperallerigic

A Bushwick Collective mural by Joe Iurato at Troutman Street and St Nicholas Avenue with a large Coors billboard in the background. (photo by Joe Iurato, courtesy the artist)

The latest additions to the Bushwick Collective, the street art project founded and curated by Joe Ficalora around the intersection of Troutman Street and St Nicholas Avenue in Brooklyn, are a number of big, garish billboards. Since artists began transforming warehouse walls in the area with large-scale murals three years ago, there has been remarkably little infringement by the type of advertisements and hand-painted billboards that have overtaken many popular street art spots in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. But in recent weeks, as Bushwick Daily has pointed out, advertisements have begun appearing on the Bushwick Collective blocks, some of them installed directly atop existing murals. More [HERE]

Prada Marfa Saved from Possible Closure as Illegal Advertisement

Glad to hear this gem was not removed for such dubious reasons as "illegal outdoor advertising".

VIA: Hyperallergic

“Prada Marfa” by Elmgreen and Dragset (photo by Marshall Astor/Wikimedia)

The Texas Department of Transportation has withdrawn its charge of illegal advertising against Prada Marfa, arts organization Ballroom Marfa announced in a public statement. A popular roadside attraction in the remote West Texas town of Marfa, the simulated Prada storefront — commissioned by Ballroom Marfa and installed in 2005 by the British artists Elmgreen & Dragset — was threatened by the state of Texas under illegal advertising statutes in September 2013. Link [HERE]

Westward Exhibition: Billboard Art Unfolds Across America

The following article comes to you from the great internet art resource Hyperallergic.

A few months ago, five national museums and the Outdoor Advertising Association of America announced Art Everywhere, a massive exhibition that will bring reproductions of artworks to advertising spaces around the country in August, decided via a public vote. This morning the artwork with the most votes was announced: Edward Hopper’s famous diner scene, “The Nighthawks” (1942). Not the most surprising choice. Give the people what they want. The people want what they know. More [HERE]

Lost in Buenos Aires, Street Art Got Me Home

I have long thought about public arts ability to implicate a sense of place upon otherwise drab environments. Commissioned public art murals and sculptures, along with the unpermissioned public interactions we call urban intervention, create moments of recognition that often tie themselves concretely to a place and your experience of that space. Through your recognition of the visual imagery, your awareness of other parts of your surroundings become more focused and your experience enriched. These images and objects have a strange way of tying you mentally and physically to the place you are in and thus creating a stronger bond between you and the environment. To me this is an incredibly important issue as we become more and more urban as a species. Relating to your public spaces is what allows you to feel connected to the city and thus the people around you. These images and objects diminish anonymity and promote a sense of community.

Below is one persons account of how those moments of recognition helped navigate a city but to me represents something much greater. Do advertisements and massive billboards do this? My thinking is no but instead of arguing about it try to think about the last moment of visual excitement you had and ask yourself what sparked that eureka moment.

VIA Hyperallergic

On a recent vacation to South America, I accidently became lost in the middle of Buenos Aires. Separated from my partner who had the maps, money, hotel name and address, not to mention a command of the native language, I panicked. More [Here]

Graffiti Laws Make No Sense: NYPD Arrests Watercolor Artist for Painting Outdoors

Very interesting post on HyperAllergic, and well worth the read.

VIA HyperAllergic

A few days ago Brooklyn artist Julie Torres contacted Hyperallergic to let us know about a serious legal issue she was facing as a result of painting outdoors. She explained that on July 17, she was enjoying a summer afternoon in Williamsburg as she worked on a large watercolor painting that was taped to a construction wall at the corner of North 11th Street and Bedford Avenue, near Hyperallergic HQ. [More here]