American Madness

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Peter Vallone Jr. is a huge… Let’s just simply say he is a big name in the ‘war’ against graffiti. In a recent Colbert Report segment Stephen Colbert took aim at Vallone. Apparently the Colbert Report used him because they “wanted to speak to they person most despised by the graffiti community.” The video is about a six year old who was reported to the department of sanitation because she was drawing on her stoop with chalk (we wrote about it a few months back).

Also for your viewing pleasure (I just found this one to be pretty impressive): (more…)

I get such glee about reading about idiocy, usually while thinking “You must be f#cking kidding me!!”

And today we have a two-fer:

First up we’ve got a school district in Atlantic City, NJ that has suspended a seven year-old due to “the school’s zero-tolerance policy for guns.”

Now, guns in school are generally considered a bad thing, and I won’t argue with that. Even toy guns can send the wrong message, so I get the idea behind a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to guns.

And I mean, a seven-year-old, right? That’s just scary. Except, the seven year-old didn’t have a gun, or a toy gun, or pretend to have a gun, or even an have an imaginary gun. He drew a picture of a gun.

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Last week was a big one for the collective known as The Splasher.

A little background first: In the past year or so in New York a lot of street art and graffiti was literally being splashed with paint, frustrating many and defacing work that was already defacing property.

There didn’t seem to be much reason or logic behind what was being splashed or where, except that it was clear that all graffiti and street art was not safe.

Last week the Splasher group released their manifesto, identifying themselves as a collective of folks rather then just one individual.

From what I have read, the writing is a bit disjointed and incoherent in its ranting, making the actual point the Splashers are trying to make a little hard to understand. Essentially, they don’t like street art and graffiti and feel that it is ruining the art community, beyond just the defacement of property (they don’t appreciate galleries displaying this type of art either). They are critics of the entire genre.

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Well, not “The Man” as in big government. “The Man” as in really awesomely cool (and yes I realize this is the second post today to use awesome and I warn you, it may not be the last).

Let’s start at the beginning, you know who Banksy is, right? You don’t? Well here is his (or maybe her) Wikipedia entry. Basically, Banksy is a legendary British “graffiti” artist, though graffiti isn’t quite the right term… Street Artist? Still not right, um, conceptional artist… I guess that will have to do, cause I am out of terms. He gained notoriety based on his graffiti-esq street art, but also has redesigned Paris Hilton’s CD on its release day, substituting his own art work in the slip cover for her CD. A bunch of his art work has been considered controversial, but in his own right he has, essentially, become legendary. In New York he walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and slapped some of his pieces of work up in various galleries. In fact, this stunt, in 2005, was so legendary that the museum has actually added these pieces to their permenant collection.

Banksy now has a video posted on his site of how he walked into the museum and added some more pieces of art to their collection.

First I would like to thank all of our readers and glancers- Yesterday we passed 200 page views in a single day (219 to be exact)! Yeah, go us. Now let’s see if we hit 300 posts or 300 viewers first.

Next up I am going to post a quick follow up to the Google Maps new Street View function, a couple of folks have been wondering (including myself) how they actually go about getting those photos. Apparently it isn’t a man with a camera and a tripod taking a panoramic photo every 15 feet, but rather a van that does that, Engadget has a photo and a brief write up on it.

Next we have another Graffiti piece (don’t ask how you write a follow up to a piece you posted less then an hour ago, sometimes ti just happens) I am just going to post the original article and the follow up, there was a reason I didn’t really get into this one, but basically a school on the Lower East side had to paint over a wall twice due to Graffiti and posted a note to the writer/community about the damage that writing on walls does to the school it was written on. After learning the meaning of the graffiti, they followed their message up with a second note to the community posted on the wall. Definitely shows a social consciousness and works on building a stronger community up around the school. The original note is here and this is the follow-up from Gothamist

And for those of you looking for Kool-Aid Pickle Recipes I am working on locating one, or just giving it a whirl myself. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we have a real Kool-Aid Pickle recipe up here.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about graffiti. It is one of those perennial hot topics. Give it some time and something will turn up about it (and usually New York City Councilman Peter Vallone will have something to say about it). Well, I actually have had two things pop up, neither one really worthy of a full post on its own, but combined…

Anyway, first up we have a class being taught at Parsons New School called “Geek Graffiti” it adds a high-tech slant to the old art form, turning your typical piece into a neon light show as it projects the tagging onto massive structures, in the end leaving no permanent marking or damage. Of course in typical fashion Peter Vallone had this to say “They want to study what the motivation is behind graffiti writers,” [he] fumed. “It’s vandalism, notoriety and gang communication. That is the motivation behind graffiti. No one needs a course to study it. This fascination with graffiti really needs to end.”

I know it is wishful thinking, but Vallone really needs to re-analyze his stance on graffiti. He needs to move beyond what graffiti was in the early 80s and realize it has a far deeper cultural relevance that goes beyond just notoriety and gang communication — that it has become a form of subservient protest and political expression that reaches beyond just gang culture. Of course it is also vandalism…

Oh and the project that was written about in the New York Post also earned the student an A, as the professor said that anyone who garnered media attention would automatically get one. The article is here.

Moving on-
Los Angeles has started a new initiative in their war on graffiti. In the past it has all been about painting over and covering up graffiti as soon as possible, but now they are using a system to track writers. Taking photos of their work using GPS cameras that track the date and time that the piece that is then loaded into a database allowing the police to have a listing of an artist’s work and file charges accordingly. Using this new system, the police busted two teens caught writing and fined them $22,000. So, if you are writing in LA, watch your back (The article from Reuters is here)