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Post by Weezy on Apr 20, 2011 17:41:05 GMT -8
Apropos to this discussion, I read today that Space Invader and his assistant were arrested. I understood the police let them go if they could confirm they'd be on a plane back to France in short order.
Weezy
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Post by The Gorgon on Apr 20, 2011 23:32:47 GMT -8
I totally agree with everyone's comments about the City Journal article written by Heather MacDonald. Basically, the article is personal attacks. What bothers me is that Ms. MacDonald is not only a contributing editor of City Journal, but also a John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. I expected more from her.
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Post by shine166 on Apr 21, 2011 3:01:14 GMT -8
cheers for that, would prefer one without RVCA on the front. |
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Post by shine166 on Apr 22, 2011 15:28:45 GMT -8
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Post by lowpro on Apr 23, 2011 5:11:20 GMT -8
This is the best show since Beautiful Losers. Can somebody pick up a Large Barry McGee RVCA t-shirt for me from the MOCA shop? I'll pay you back with a special gift. Hit me off with a PM if you didn't manage to track one down. Grabbed an extra Large of the Blue McGee shirt that RVCA doesn't have on their site with you in mind the other day. They weren't cheap. But it's your if you want it. |
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Post by shine166 on Apr 23, 2011 9:01:04 GMT -8
This is the best show since Beautiful Losers. Can somebody pick up a Large Barry McGee RVCA t-shirt for me from the MOCA shop? I'll pay you back with a special gift. Hit me off with a PM if you didn't manage to track one down. Grabbed an extra Large of the Blue McGee shirt that RVCA doesn't have on their site with you in mind the other day. They weren't cheap. But it's your if you want it. How much are these from Moca ? |
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Post by epicfai on Apr 23, 2011 18:00:42 GMT -8
Hit me off with a PM if you didn't manage to track one down. Grabbed an extra Large of the Blue McGee shirt that RVCA doesn't have on their site with you in mind the other day. They weren't cheap. But it's your if you want it. How much are these from Moca ? i think they were 30-something bucks maybe? wish they didnt have the big RVCA across the front. |
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Post by jujurocs on Apr 23, 2011 19:45:28 GMT -8
lowpro, thanks for the offer bro. I ended up ordering a sweatshirt with the same design from RVCA...it's still cold in midwest ; )
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Post by lowpro on Apr 23, 2011 20:06:23 GMT -8
Ok cool. Felt bad not hooking a good friend back in Philly when I get home, so works out. Just had your post in the back of my head when I ended up in the store before leaving the museum. Just for reference, here's an image.  I've never seen this on the RVCA site, but maybe it's new and will be available down the road. Grabbed one of the Futura Nike SB shirts too, as I doubted I'd see those available elsewhere. |
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Post by epicfai on Apr 23, 2011 20:12:14 GMT -8
Ok cool. Felt bad not hooking a good friend back in Philly when I get home, so works out. Just had your post in the back of my head when I ended up in the store before leaving the museum. Just for reference, here's an image. I've never seen this on the RVCA site, but maybe it's new and will be available down the road. Grabbed one of the Futura Nike SB shirts too, as I doubted I'd see those available elsewhere. i like this shirt. the RVCA is much more subtle. didnt see this one when i was there. |
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Post by The Gorgon on May 1, 2011 12:57:38 GMT -8
FROM NY TIMES
April 22, 2011
A Risk-Taker’s Debut
By GUY TREBAY
LOS ANGELES
NECK FACE banged a metal pipe on the side of a blacked-out doorway, jumping out at unsuspecting passers-by to shout, “Aaarrgh!” Banksy floated anonymously (or so went the rumor) around the perimeter of a room dominated by a huge cathedral window the graffiti artist had scrawled with spray paint. Skateboarders skidded off geometric ramps designed by Lance Mountain and Geoff McFetridge just inside the entrance of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA as an art mob filed in from a brisk evening and up a ramp into the enveloping graffiti world of “Art in the Streets,” the first major American museum exhibition devoted to street art, and a first for an occasionally controversial museum director making a debut.
It is just over a year since Jeffrey Deitch, a longtime New York gallery owner, was named director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and charged with rescuing an institution whose attendance had dwindled by 2009 to a paltry 148,616, as its endowment shrank to the lowest level since the museum’s founding nearly three decades ago.
Even the number of museum trustees had diminished when its board surprised the art world with what even David Johnson, a chairman of the museum’s board noted last week, was a risky choice to head the museum. “Jeffrey was way, way, way out there as a candidate,” he said.
The risk in hiring an established risk-taker was a calculated one, said Eli Broad, the billionaire collector and arts patron whose $30 million challenge grant to the museum in 2008 helped save the faltering institution.
“We wanted someone who was, call it what you want, a game-changer,” Mr. Broad said by phone before the opening of “Art in the Streets,” Mr. Deitch’s first full-scale show. What the board sought during a worldwide search, added Mr. Broad, was someone who was, frankly, “an impresario.” What it got in Mr. Deitch was an unorthodox choice and yet a canny one, an owlish 58-year-old with a Harvard M.B.A., a background in finance, a former corporate art adviser and a person who, after shifting careers from finance and consulting to become a full-time art dealer, mounted shows like “Session the Bowl,” devoted to the culture of skateboarding, and installations like “Black Acid Co-op,” which recreated a burned-out methamphetamine laboratory, or “Nest,” in which two artists moved into his Grand Street gallery, first filling it with the shredded remains of numberless telephone books.
Mr. Deitch — trim, mild-mannered, a distance runner who favors custom-made suits from Caraceni and buffalo-horn eyeglasses he designed himself — gives little appearance of being the sort of person who might stage a dinner to celebrate the publication of a photographer’s new book and then invite the members of an all-male artist collective to entertain the 250 seated guests by clambering (wearing tuxedo jackets, stilettos and fishnets) across a wooden structure vaulting dinner table set with fine napery and silver candelabras and, once installed there, to urinate into one another’s bucket hats. Yet he is.
“It was spectacular, perverse, uplifting, beautifully horrifying and deeply transgressive,” Mr. Deitch said of that particular evening, in a New Yorker profile. It was also, like many of Mr. Deitch’s seeming transgressions, professionally well judged.
Among the unlikely-seeming reasons that the Museum of Contemporary Arts board bypassed more-conventionally-trained museum professionals for a man sometimes termed an heir to P. T. Barnum, Mr. Broad suggested, was his involvement in the Art Parade, an annual procession through downtown Manhattan in which the Dazzle Dancers and motley locals disport themselves in mainly Spandex and glitter.
If, as Andy Warhol used to say, business art is the best art, the best business art in a town like this one may be the show business kind. Mr. Deitch is an avowed Warholian who considers obscure performance artists like the intellectual transvestite Vaginal Davis a celebrity, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian artists manqués.
From the pool terrace of the 8,000-square-foot house that Mr. Deitch currently rents in the hills near Griffith Park (and that Cary Grant is said to have shared with Randolph Scott), a postcard panorama takes in his new city: terraced movie-star gardens, downtown skyscrapers, the far-off Pacific wreathed in haze. Above Mr. Deitch’s bed hangs an abstract Aaron Young painting that, when stared at, produces an after-image of Christ; in a nearby hall is a preparatory sketch for Warhol’s painting “Before and After.”
“This is such an important, early, seminal work,” Mr. Deitch told a visitor one recent morning, referring to Warhol’s celebrated image, taken from an newspaper advertisement, depicting a woman before and after a nose job. It makes sense that, among the artworks Mr. Deitch has acquired, those he chose to show a guest depict a messianic prophet and radical metamorphosis.
“We want to set the agenda” for the coming decade, Mr. Johnson, the museum co-chairman, had said, referring to the museum.
That agenda became more plausible with the appointment last year of Mr. Deitch, following that of Michael Govan, the former director of the DIA Foundation, to head the Los Angeles County Museum; and of Ann Philbin, the well-regarded director of the Drawing Center, to run the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The arrival of this troika, a seemingly unbeatable combination, and the decision of prominent New York galleries like Gagosian and Matthew Marks to establish outposts in Los Angeles (Mr. Marks’s gallery will open next winter), did much to bolster Mr. Broad’s grand assertion that “Los Angeles could become the contemporary art capital of the world.”
If Mr. Deitch shares Mr. Broad’s ambitions, it’s in a played-down manner that can seem oddly like an asset in a town where hyperbole is the norm and personalities are often as bloated as floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (See: Weintraub, Jerry.)
“We’re acculturated to the fusion of media now,” and equally to the decades-old institutionalization of high/low aesthetics, Mr. Deitch said one day last week over lunch at the down-home Urth Caffe, his hangout, where patrons bus their own trays. “Art, film, fashion, music are all going on and interacting simultaneously,” he added. “And L.A. is very receptive to that fusion.”
Critics of Mr. Deitch, and there are many, hold their noses at his apparent indifference to art-world hierarchies, equating his appointment with the death of civilization.
“The supreme opportunist,” Jed Perl, art critic for The New Republic, wrote of him in a critique that stopped just short of accusing Mr. Deitch of running a shop for art-trend knickknacks.
Some, like the blogger who attributed a series of moronic remarks to Mr. Deitch on Twitter, under the handle @fakedeitch, see him as a carpetbagger. Some, on the evidence of stealth videos that made the rounds for a time, view him as an art-world Führer, a heavy-handed censor who, shortly before “Art in the Streets” was set to open, ordered a graffiti mural by the Italian artist Blu painted over because its content, rows of coffins draped in dollar bills, was too political.
“That killed me,” said Mr. Deitch of the controversy surrounding his decision to blot out Blu’s mural, a move he explained was made necessary by the mural’s position facing a memorial commemorating Japanese-American soldiers who fell during World War II.
None of this mattered to the crowds lined up outside the Geffen Center in Little Tokyo last Saturday, not the censorship or the future of museums or the tendency among many in the art world to scour each minor occurrence for meaning, the way ancient divines did the entrails of birds.
They had come to see Neck Face, the graffiti artist whose installation — a menacing alley replete with flashing lights and the artist as a filth-covered hobo — was inspired, he explained, not by such obvious forerunners as the artist Mike Kelley but by his family’s unofficial trade constructing haunted houses. They’d come for the gloomy, wall-covering murals of inverted dead mammals by the Belgian graffiti artist ROA and the candy-colored cartoon ones by graffiti elders like Kenny Scharf and Futura 2000, né Leonard McGurr.
They’d come for the gorgeously calligraphic markings by Retna; the demented funhouse installations by the Brazilian twins Os Gêmeos; the wall of faux naïve placards by the late Margaret Kilgallen; the “period” spaces recreated or taken intact from such shrines to the graffiti movement as the Fun Gallery or the black-lighted TriBeCa loft long inhabited by the graffiti legend Rammellzee.
This list barely begins to cover the extent of an outlaw artistic movement in “Art in the Streets,” which tracks the great graffiti dispersion from styles first created in New York by Lee Quinones, Dondi, Futura 2000 and others and that soon enough made it to Philadelphia, Chicago, the West Coast and the world.
The Los Angeles Times termed “Art in the Streets” a “bombastic, near-overwhelming cavalcade of eye-candy,” a crowd-teasing pull-quote if ever there was one. And while it’s too early to know how the exhibition will fare with critics, there is little reason to doubt Mr. Broad’s assertion that it will likely pull the crowds in and engage a new public, most particularly “audiences that would not otherwise go to museums.”
But the greater challenge faced by Mr. Deitch and others in the field is not luring new audiences accustomed to consuming media in blended form as much as it is attracting those who consume most media on hand-held tablets back into a brick-and-mortar temples to art. Will he be able to draw Angelenos off the freeways and the often gritty streets with even grittier and dystopic-Disney versions of American lives as conjured in a raunchy, immersive installation titled “Street”?
Will the decision to make his directorial mark with an ephemeral and often outlaw art form pay off for Mr. Deitch and the museum? Is “Art in the Streets” his signature gesture, his tag?
“We have to be very careful here to keep things rigorous and not pollute” the underlying mission of institutions like MOCA to uphold the highest standards of culture, Mr. Deitch said. “But at the same time, the art world has a tendency to academicism and aridity. I’m very interested in seeing that art remains connected to emotion. I’m a very optimistic person and it’s important to me that the museum conveys that optimism to people, that the art we show stays connected to life.”
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Post by The Gorgon on May 1, 2011 22:11:50 GMT -8
Here is another article from ms. Heather MacDonald, the infamous writer from City Journal. This time she wrote an article for the LA Times. She's still opposed to MOCA's show, but at least this time she has an argument, rather than personal attacks.
latimes.com
Op-Ed
Tagging MOCA
'Art in the Streets' has earned the museum accolades from the art world. But in glorifying graffiti, it celebrates a crime that destroys the city's vitality.
By Heather Mac Donald
May 1, 2011
advertisement
The Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles is celebrating graffiti, but not on its own property. MOCA's pyramid-topped headquarters on Grand Avenue is conspicuously tag-free. In Little Tokyo, the museum has always painted over the graffiti that appears occasionally on the outside walls of the Geffen Contemporary, its satellite warehouse exhibition space. And now that its latest show — proudly billed as the first major American museum survey of street art — has triggered a predictable upsurge of vandalism in the area, MOCA is even cleaning up graffiti on neighboring businesses.
Why is that? "Art in the Streets" suggests no answer. The exhibition honors such alleged high points in graffiti history as the first cholo tag on the Arroyo Seco parkway and the defacement of L.A.'s freeway signs, without the slightest hint that graffiti is a crime, that it appropriates and damages property without permission and that it destroys urban vitality.
In fact, MOCA's practice of removing graffiti from its premises represents cutting-edge urban policy. Over the last three decades, urban theorists have come to understand the harmful effects of graffiti on neighborhood cohesion and safety. An area that has succumbed to tagging telegraphs to the world that social and parental control there has broken down. Potential customers shun graffiti-ridden commercial strips if they can; so do most merchants, fearing shoplifting and robberies. Law-abiding families avoid graffiti-blighted public parks, driven away by the spirit-killing ugliness of graffiti as much as by its criminality.
But MOCA's hypocrisy in glorifying a crime that it would never tolerate on its own property is easily matched by the two-faced behavior of graffiti vandals themselves. They often dress up their egotistical assault on other people's property with defiant rhetoric about fighting corporate power and capitalism. (How spraying your tag on a bodega on Cesar Chavez Boulevard weakens corporations is never explained, of course.) But what happens when these scourges of profit and bourgeois values see an opportunity to get rich? They turn into unapologetic capitalists.
Britain's Banksy sells his stencils for thousands of pounds at auction. Sticker and poster vandal Shepard Fairey widely promotes his extensive line of clothing and collectibles. Saber, lionized by MOCA for having painted what is reputed to be the largest-ever tag on the "banks" of the Los Angeles River, near where the 5 Freeway meets the 10, has sold designs to Levi's, Hyundai and Harley-Davidson.
"Art in the Streets" co-curator and longtime graffiti promoter Roger Gastman vaunts the corporate clients that he brands with graffiti chic. None of these lucrative arrangements would be possible without a stable system of property rights, which graffiti vandals respect only when their own wealth is involved.
Good luck to parents trying to keep their children away from a tagging lifestyle, now that word is out that a fancy downtown museum has honored graffiti with a major exhibit. And those children who visit the show will learn that MOCA thinks tagging is cool — just look at that life-size, animatronic tagger endlessly spraying his tag high up on a wall!
It might have been possible to mount a show that acknowledged the occasionally compelling graphic elements of urban art without legitimizing a crime. Such an exhibit wouldn't include glamorizing photos of freeway, subway or L.A. River vandalism — and would unequivocally condemn appropriating someone else's property without permission. "Art in the Streets" does not come close to that standard.
Schoolchildren who deduce from the show that graffiti is a route to fame and contracts with Nike will have about as realistic an understanding of their career odds as boys who think they don't have to study because an NBA contract awaits them. Every hour that a student is out tagging is an hour not spent studying, attending school or getting crucial sleep — all activities essential to future success.
In January, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's top financial advisor recommended cuts to the city's graffiti-abatement budget. City Council members and the mayor himself rose up in protest.
"Art in the Streets" gives no clue why Angelenos should care so much about graffiti eradication. Indeed, if graffiti is the boon that "Art in the Streets" suggests, why should taxpayers shell out $7 million a year to have it painted over? If, however, the public is right to demand its removal, why is MOCA promoting it? I asked MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch whether Los Angeles should suspend its graffiti removal efforts. "I don't know," he responded.
The ultimate responsibility for "Art in the Streets" lies with MOCA's buzz-hungry trustees, from Eli Broad on down. When Deitch first proposed a graffiti exhibit, any conscientious trustee should have asked himself: "Would I welcome unauthorized 'street art' by some Saber wannabe on my immaculate mansion or business?"
In case the answer is not obvious, let's listen to the taggers themselves. "I've never written on my own house," a former tagger from Gardena's Graffiti Bandits Krew told me. He was waiting to get his tattoos removed at Homeboy Industries downtown. "I wouldn't like it if someone else did it on my house."
Another ex-tagger from Graffiti 'N' Drugs in Pico Rivera finds my question about whether he would tolerate graffiti on his home silly. "Why would you want to [ louse] up your own house?" he asked me. "That's why you go out and mess up other people's cities."
MOCA's administration shares a defining trait with the graffiti vandals whom the museum is celebrating: self-indulgence. The graffiti criminal combines the moral instincts of a 2-year-old with the physical capacities of an adult: When he sees a "spot" that he wants to "mark," he simply takes it. Deitch and his trustees can toy with graffiti's "outlaw vibe" (as co-curator Aaron Rose euphemistically puts it), knowing full well that their own carefully ordered lives will be untouched by graffiti's ill effects.
But large swaths of Los Angeles and other urban centers are not so protected. "Art in the Streets" has already earned MOCA accolades from the art world, but it will only increase the struggles of Los Angeles' poor communities — and its not-so-poor ones too — to enjoy the security and order that the wealthy take for granted.
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Post by sleepboy on May 15, 2011 0:29:29 GMT -8
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Post by The Gorgon on May 15, 2011 10:25:39 GMT -8
That was awesome sleepboy thanks
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Post by shine166 on May 16, 2011 1:23:41 GMT -8
Ok cool. Felt bad not hooking a good friend back in Philly when I get home, so works out. Just had your post in the back of my head when I ended up in the store before leaving the museum. Just for reference, here's an image. I've never seen this on the RVCA site, but maybe it's new and will be available down the road. Grabbed one of the Futura Nike SB shirts too, as I doubted I'd see those available elsewhere. still after one of these if anyone can help |
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Post by swabie2424 on May 23, 2011 15:00:47 GMT -8
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Post by sleepboy on May 23, 2011 17:36:31 GMT -8
Welcome and thanks for the pics. You must have been stoked to have bumped into Shep there.
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Post by swabie2424 on May 23, 2011 19:44:43 GMT -8
Welcome and thanks for the pics. You must have been stoked to have bumped into Shep there. Thanks so much for the welcome, sleepyboy. Yeah, I was stoked. I own a bunch of Shep prints (Peace Elephant etc), so it's always kinda nice to have met a person whose art graces your home. The funny thing is, after he left, some older folks from out of town came up to me and asked, "Who was that?" ;D ;D Man, now if I could have only met Lee Quinones... or heck, Banksy!  |
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Post by rhinomilk on May 23, 2011 21:33:39 GMT -8
Thanks so much for the welcome, sleepyboy. Yeah, I was stoked. I own a bunch of Shep prints (Peace Elephant etc), so it's always kinda nice to have met a person whose art graces your home. The funny thing is, after he left, some older folks from out of town came up to me and asked, "Who was that?" ;D ;D Man, now if I could have only met Lee Quinones... or heck, Banksy! Banksy was the lady who sold you your ticket at the entrance. WHO KNEW? |
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Post by commandax on May 27, 2011 18:19:22 GMT -8
Another take on the MOCA show from the L.A. Times, still critical but in a completely different, and much more interesting, way. "... Having lived in Hollywood for more than a dozen years in the 1980s and '90s, I'm pretty well convinced that urban graffiti doesn't drag down neighborhoods, but instead erupts in areas already largely abandoned by civic forces. Graffiti scrawls a name on hitherto faceless social realities, instantly becoming a convenient target for blame. Graffiti is a vernacular art. The remoteness of City Hall and the anonymity of socioeconomic power are confronted by in-your-face tagging, whose anarchic purpose is to register individual identity. In its crudest form it blurts, "I exist!" Its more imaginative forms also shout, "And I'm fantastic!" Yes, graffiti is vandalism — a truism I know well from having repeatedly painted it out on my own former domicile. But what has that to do with MOCA? As critic William Poundstone pointedly asked, how many museum shows of El Greco are required to take a position on the Spanish Inquisition? Still, MOCA's claim for the magnitude of graffiti's post-Pop influence on art is overblown. "Art in the Streets" cites global reach, including London; São Paolo, Brazil; Athens; and Tokyo, as evidence. (Sixty artists are surveyed.) Since the 1970s, however, the deepest impact on art culture has come from Conceptual art, not graffiti." ...etc.
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Post by sleepboy on Jun 20, 2011 18:39:55 GMT -8
Here is another article from ms. Heather MacDonald, the infamous writer from City Journal. This time she wrote an article for the LA Times. She's still opposed to MOCA's show, but at least this time she has an argument, rather than personal attacks. latimes.com Op-Ed Tagging MOCA 'Art in the Streets' has earned the museum accolades from the art world. But in glorifying graffiti, it celebrates a crime that destroys the city's vitality. By Heather Mac Donald May 1, 2011 advertisement The Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles is celebrating graffiti, but not on its own property. MOCA's pyramid-topped headquarters on Grand Avenue is conspicuously tag-free. In Little Tokyo, the museum has always painted over the graffiti that appears occasionally on the outside walls of the Geffen Contemporary, its satellite warehouse exhibition space. And now that its latest show — proudly billed as the first major American museum survey of street art — has triggered a predictable upsurge of vandalism in the area, MOCA is even cleaning up graffiti on neighboring businesses. Why is that? "Art in the Streets" suggests no answer. The exhibition honors such alleged high points in graffiti history as the first cholo tag on the Arroyo Seco parkway and the defacement of L.A.'s freeway signs, without the slightest hint that graffiti is a crime, that it appropriates and damages property without permission and that it destroys urban vitality. In fact, MOCA's practice of removing graffiti from its premises represents cutting-edge urban policy. Over the last three decades, urban theorists have come to understand the harmful effects of graffiti on neighborhood cohesion and safety. An area that has succumbed to tagging telegraphs to the world that social and parental control there has broken down. Potential customers shun graffiti-ridden commercial strips if they can; so do most merchants, fearing shoplifting and robberies. Law-abiding families avoid graffiti-blighted public parks, driven away by the spirit-killing ugliness of graffiti as much as by its criminality. But MOCA's hypocrisy in glorifying a crime that it would never tolerate on its own property is easily matched by the two-faced behavior of graffiti vandals themselves. They often dress up their egotistical assault on other people's property with defiant rhetoric about fighting corporate power and capitalism. (How spraying your tag on a bodega on Cesar Chavez Boulevard weakens corporations is never explained, of course.) But what happens when these scourges of profit and bourgeois values see an opportunity to get rich? They turn into unapologetic capitalists. Britain's Banksy sells his stencils for thousands of pounds at auction. Sticker and poster vandal Shepard Fairey widely promotes his extensive line of clothing and collectibles. Saber, lionized by MOCA for having painted what is reputed to be the largest-ever tag on the "banks" of the Los Angeles River, near where the 5 Freeway meets the 10, has sold designs to Levi's, Hyundai and Harley-Davidson. "Art in the Streets" co-curator and longtime graffiti promoter Roger Gastman vaunts the corporate clients that he brands with graffiti chic. None of these lucrative arrangements would be possible without a stable system of property rights, which graffiti vandals respect only when their own wealth is involved. Good luck to parents trying to keep their children away from a tagging lifestyle, now that word is out that a fancy downtown museum has honored graffiti with a major exhibit. And those children who visit the show will learn that MOCA thinks tagging is cool — just look at that life-size, animatronic tagger endlessly spraying his tag high up on a wall! It might have been possible to mount a show that acknowledged the occasionally compelling graphic elements of urban art without legitimizing a crime. Such an exhibit wouldn't include glamorizing photos of freeway, subway or L.A. River vandalism — and would unequivocally condemn appropriating someone else's property without permission. "Art in the Streets" does not come close to that standard. Schoolchildren who deduce from the show that graffiti is a route to fame and contracts with Nike will have about as realistic an understanding of their career odds as boys who think they don't have to study because an NBA contract awaits them. Every hour that a student is out tagging is an hour not spent studying, attending school or getting crucial sleep — all activities essential to future success. In January, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's top financial advisor recommended cuts to the city's graffiti-abatement budget. City Council members and the mayor himself rose up in protest. "Art in the Streets" gives no clue why Angelenos should care so much about graffiti eradication. Indeed, if graffiti is the boon that "Art in the Streets" suggests, why should taxpayers shell out $7 million a year to have it painted over? If, however, the public is right to demand its removal, why is MOCA promoting it? I asked MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch whether Los Angeles should suspend its graffiti removal efforts. "I don't know," he responded. The ultimate responsibility for "Art in the Streets" lies with MOCA's buzz-hungry trustees, from Eli Broad on down. When Deitch first proposed a graffiti exhibit, any conscientious trustee should have asked himself: "Would I welcome unauthorized 'street art' by some Saber wannabe on my immaculate mansion or business?" In case the answer is not obvious, let's listen to the taggers themselves. "I've never written on my own house," a former tagger from Gardena's Graffiti Bandits Krew told me. He was waiting to get his tattoos removed at Homeboy Industries downtown. "I wouldn't like it if someone else did it on my house." Another ex-tagger from Graffiti 'N' Drugs in Pico Rivera finds my question about whether he would tolerate graffiti on his home silly. "Why would you want to [ louse] up your own house?" he asked me. "That's why you go out and mess up other people's cities." MOCA's administration shares a defining trait with the graffiti vandals whom the museum is celebrating: self-indulgence. The graffiti criminal combines the moral instincts of a 2-year-old with the physical capacities of an adult: When he sees a "spot" that he wants to "mark," he simply takes it. Deitch and his trustees can toy with graffiti's "outlaw vibe" (as co-curator Aaron Rose euphemistically puts it), knowing full well that their own carefully ordered lives will be untouched by graffiti's ill effects. But large swaths of Los Angeles and other urban centers are not so protected. "Art in the Streets" has already earned MOCA accolades from the art world, but it will only increase the struggles of Los Angeles' poor communities — and its not-so-poor ones too — to enjoy the security and order that the wealthy take for granted. Saber's response... After looking at the longest list of credentials of one person I’ve ever seen—Yale, University Of Cambridge, Stanford Law, Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, recipient of 2005 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement, etc, etc—I came to the conclusion that approaching Heather Mac Donald’s fortified intellect would be the equivalent of challenging the IBM Chess Terminator: cold, calculating, and absent a pulse. I find it hard to believe that someone of such high stature would spend so much energy on something that seems trivial in comparison to her passion for deportation and torture. Yet she seems really upset at the idea of a museum honoring over forty years of development in Graffiti Art. In her lengthy article “Radical Graffiti Chic,” she refers to artists as “vandal-anarchist wannabes” and attempts to highlight their hypocrisy. She names me personally in the article, stating that I am quick to sell out to any corporate sponsor: “Saber, who declares in an interview with the graffiti journal Arrested Motion that ‘there is no room for empathy when there is a motive for profit,’ has sold his designs to Levi’s, Hyundai, and Harley-Davidson.” In trying to paint me as a hypocrite for capitalizing on my intellectual property, Heather does not take into account that I support my family through my art. I have painted everything from sets to faux finishing to gold leafing to put food on the table or to pay for health care bills, since insurance companies have refused to cover me due to a pre-existing condition (epilepsy). Heather, who is paid to write articles, should understand the process of making money for one’s creative output, and that this is not what I was referring to in the Arrested Motion quote. I was referring to health insurance companies taking away accessible facilities from sick people in order to save a buck at the expense of the patient’s life. To compare my art to the health insurance companies is ludicrous. Global, entrepreneurial, and interconnected, the Graffiti Art movement has created its own market and fueled many more. Hollywood and music videos have utilized graffiti style since the 1980s. It should come as no surprise that corporations have aped graffiti imagery and tactics too. After all, the visual content created by this art movement drives millions of hits in web traffic and makes hundreds of millions of dollars in streetwear clothing, publishing, photography, artist materials and spray paint. There is no need to “sell out” when you are busy building. We are an industry, run from the street rather than a boardroom. Heather Mac Donald pontificates on an array of topics from the safe, sterile vantage point of an elitist, watching life through the eyes of a godless conservative. This verbal assassin is quick to pass judgment on an art movement that she has little understanding of. Heather seems to view Graffiti Art as the culprit of the degradation of society, incapable or unwilling to recognize that graffiti tagging is a symptom of a bigger problem. The economic consequences of conservative policy makers, the failed War on Drugs, and the expansion of the private prison industry has left people with a sense of hopelessness. In my lifetime, parts of our country have turned into a wasteland of both private and public space. For many youths, Graffiti Art filled a void created by billions of dollars in education cuts. Arts programs go beyond the typical education structure of standardized testing and help young people to express themselves. If you eliminate that opportunity then that energy has to go elsewhere. And I’m sorry, but a two-dollar watercolor set from Walmart is not the answer. That ignorant statement is equivalent to telling kids interested in science to get Poprocks and soda to mix the two. Why not make use of dilapidated, neglected space? Why not make use of a dirty, empty lot or an abandoned train tunnel? For many young artists, Graffiti Art is an environment of aggressive competition to create (a name, a style, a masterpiece), not destroy. Why is it OK for the ad industry to assault urban landscapes with alcohol advertisements while a young person gets a felony for putting a sticker on a lamppost? Why is it OK to invest billions on the incarceration an entire generation in the private prison system yet its taboo to invest in the arts? Heather seems to think that this art movement is based solely in the ghettos and for the glorification of illegal activity. My personal mission was never based on the “thrill” alone but on the development of an abstract art form. Many critics are under the impression that if it looks like a wild, stylized graffiti piece, then it must have been painted illegally. These complex murals often take days to complete. I get permission and have personally donated hundreds of hours in painting beautiful works in local neighborhoods. These murals stay clean and serve as graffiti abatement in spaces that are habitually tagged. Trust me, if it looks elaborate, then chances are that mural was painted with the explicit permission of the property owner. One week before the opening of MOCA’s Art In the Streets, Graffiti Solutions, a business contracted by L.A. County, broke into private property and painted over a commissioned mural painted by several artists featured in the show. The building owner and locals alike were in an uproar. The community came together and demanded an explanation. The company had to come back the next day and pressure-wash the grey paint off the mural surface and offered to pay for the artists to repair the damage caused. I believe the city is paying private companies to censure art at the taxpayers’ expense. These companies even use attractive graffiti to promote their business. I wonder if Heather agrees with the city’s tactics? Isn’t this, not only a waste of tax money but government overstepping into the rights of private property owners as well? The claim that L.A. County spends $30 million a year on graffiti removal is a complete fabrication and anyone who wants to be fiscally responsible should look into how that money was spent. Those numbers are inflated for political gain and change with every new press release. In 2009, the City of Los Angeles used $3.4 million of Federal Stimulus Funds to remove graffiti from the L.A. River. They said they needed that much money for hazardous-material crews to pressure wash the paint off the surface, and dam the river to collect the paint chips so none of it would end up in the water run off. Instead, they held a ribbon cutting ceremony that included the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, a pair of City council members, and the L.A. Sheriff’s department to take turns spraying white paint on the surface. Those funds should have gone to schools and rebuilding our dilapidated infrastructure, instead they hired a contractor to paint thirty miles of the L.A. River white. Adding thousands of gallons of white paint to the concrete slopes, they created an enormous, newly primed canvas. When asked how spending this money would stop people from hitting the walls again, the sheriff said, “Nothing. We’ll just give them felonies.” It starts when a kid tags on a pole. Detectives and the police hunt down a teenager with no previous criminal record. They raid his house using SWAT tactics with the local news trailing behind them. The politician has a friendly win and prison gets another body. It costs $50,000 a year to house an inmate at the taxpayer’s expense while private prisons reap rewards for shareholders. This country spends $68 billion a year on corrections, 300 percent more than 25 years ago. These extreme measures are a waste of money and are not leading to solutions. The continuous prosecution has only helped create martyrs for the cause. I think a better solution would be to allocate a percentage of the funds used to incarcerate people and put that money towards job training programs and community improvements. Heather shows a limited understanding of what is actually happening on the street. In searching for an extreme view of the toxicity of tagging, she interviewed people at Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles gang intervention outreach program. Sadly, a tragic story isn’t difficult to find there. If she had dug deeper she would have found that for some, graffiti is considered an alternative route away from the dead-end gang life. I doubt she was willing to stick around at Homeboy Industries long enough to find anything beyond the quotes she plucked. I’m sure none of the Homeboys would even speak to her if they knew her extreme positions on immigration. Chicano letterforms have certainly been influential artistically (particularly in Los Angeles), but Graffiti Art has nothing to do with the territorial marking and violence of gangs. However, since the LAPD would like you to think otherwise, they came up with the derogatory term “tag-banger” to conflate the two. I don’t believe in turning my back on those kids, and I have met plenty of them that would look you straight in the eye and tell you that Graffiti Art saved their life. “To be sure, some graffiti murals are visually striking, showing an intuitive understanding of graphic design (though their representational iconography is usually pure adolescent male wish-fulfillment, featuring drug paraphernalia, cartoon characters, T&A, space guns, and alien invaders). In theory, it might be possible to mount a show that acknowledged the occasionally compelling formal elements of wall painting without legitimating a crime. Such an exhibit would include only authorized murals, whether past or present, and would unequivocally condemn taking someone else’s property without permission. No graffiti propaganda has ever abided by such limits; the MOCA show will not, either.” In the quote above Heather gives Graffiti Art a sprinkling of merit. But her assumption that this skill is purely intuitive reveals how little she understands. Far from “infantile solipsism,” the skills of artists in a crew are developed through mentoring. I am a strong believer in the idea that you get out of life what you put into it. I want to be recognized as an artist based on the merit of my art. When I was younger I wasn’t able to grasp the consequences of every action. While I would never take back any of my experiences, I feel I have learned important lessons over time. Ultimately, Graffiti Art has led me to a positive place. I believe that most of the artists in MOCA’s Art In The Streets have contributed to its development with hard work and artistic integrity. The grossly exaggerated cry of “increased vandalism” during the show never materialized and the surrounding businesses are reaping the financial benefits of the throngs of people attending the museum to see the show, which is set to break museum attendance records. Heather, your battle cry is too late. The Art In The Streets show at MOCA is a huge success. The people have spoken. The museum has been packed since day one and it is clear this is only the beginning. Coming next March, I will be celebrating with my peers in the great halls of the Brooklyn Museum while you will be hunched over your computer concocting your next witches’ brew. “In atmosphere of liberty, artists and patrons are free to think the unthinkable and create the audacious; they are free to make both horrendous mistakes and glorious celebrations.” (Ronald Reagan – Farewell Address, Jan. 1989) |
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Post by commandax on Jun 20, 2011 19:10:43 GMT -8
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Post by jB on Jun 20, 2011 19:49:42 GMT -8
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Post by afroken on Jun 21, 2011 13:09:32 GMT -8
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Post by epicfai on Jun 21, 2011 14:05:14 GMT -8
how very unfortunate and short-sighted. wonder if an alternate venue will come forward? |
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