By Cory Doctorow at 10:00 am Monday, May 21
• Comments • Share
A pair of Toronto neighbours, Elly Dowson and Christine Liber, set out to cover the coach-house doors in their laneway with awesome murals. This was in the context of an edict from Toronto's dipshit mayor, Rob Ford, who has instituted fines for property owners who don't remove graffiti from their premises. Dowson and Liber figured taggers would be less likely to go after murals, and that their project would also beautify their neighbourhood.
Elly and Christine delivered flyers along their street – they offered to paint resident’s garages with art. The service was offered free of charge, and the paint was generously donated by Maple Paints on St. Clair Avenue West. Responding to the flyer, residents who share the laneway between Kenwood Avenue and Wychwood Avenue began to grant permission to have their garages turned into ‘urban art’. Elly and Christine got to work.
Some of the art was created through stencils, some of the paintings were inspired by artists like Miro, Keith Haring and Mark Rothko, and some were original creations. Soon, the ‘urban art’ initiative started to gain momentum – with good weather on their side, Elly and Christine painted 21 garages in 21 days. Some of the residents had a ton of graffiti, and some had none at all – but everyone agreed that the art might be a great way to minimize future graffiti.
The Kenwood/Wychwood laneway has become a living art gallery. The new art quickly became a destination within the neighbourhood – there was a noticeable increase in foot and bicycle traffic, making for a safer laneway. The initiative not only galvanized the street, but the laneway became a source of pride and has helped build a sense of community.
Elly was once my babysitter -- this is so cool.
The Kenwood Lane Art Initiative: 21 Garages in 21 Days
Flickr slideshow
(via Torontoist, thanks Mom!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:00 am Tuesday, May 15
• Comments • Share
Marc Jacobs's SoHo boutique was graffitied by Kidult, who painted ART in giant pink letters across the storefront. Jacobs had the graffiti photographed, removed, and printed on a t-shirt, which he offered for sale for $689, or "Signed by the artist, $680."
Earlier this week, on the night of the Met Ball, the Marc Jacobs boutique in SoHo was hit by French graffiti artist Kidult, who has famously vandalized Supreme, Hermes, and Louis Vuitton, among others. The hit? Kidult took a fire extinguisher filled with pink paint, and sprayed the word ART over the front of the store (seen above).
As a crew cleaned it up the next morning and Kidult took to Twitter to brag, Marc Jacobs and his canny reps turned the stunt on its head, capitalizing on the graffiti artist’s own work to the benefit of their own marketing: By Tweeting it out as “Art by Art Jacobs” and Instagramming an ‘artsy’ picture of it. Kidult, clearly on the scene, tried to make his presence known, but it was too late: Jacobs had won that one.
Update: Aaand now Wilfry is selling a $35 "meta-tee." (Thanks, Emily!)
Marc Jacobs vs. The Graffiti Artist, Round 2: When Jacobs Turns Vandalized Store Into $680 Shirt
(via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:02 am Monday, Apr 23
• Comments • Share
A little bit of Star Wars-meets-Occupy street art, snapped near my flat in Hackney, London.
Occupy Wall St The 99% We Are, Yoda stencil, Great Eastern Street, Hackney, London.jpg
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am Thursday, Apr 19
• Comments • Share
Ess G writes, "Much as I don't want to encourage anyone to laugh at us here in Toronto, this is really just too ridiculous to share. Our Mayor has just launched his $1.99 app that makes it easy for people to report graffiti in need of cleaning up simply by taking a picture. For this low low price, the app saves graffiti haters the trouble of going through all the hard work of dialling 311. The attached link features a city-staged enactment complete with bad graffiti saying 'Fuck you, my turf.' Amazing."
Toronto's mayor Rob Ford is a kind of idiot-non-savant, a dunce and thug who rode to power by promising that he'd "end the gravy-train" of municipal spending and ended up chasing pissant causes like graffiti removal (he's going to charge small businesses to remove the graffiti on their walls, even if the graffiti in question is a beautiful mural that everyone, including the business-owner, approves of), tickets for bicycles that lock up to things other than official (and hens-teeth-scarce) bike-locks, and expensive vanity projects like removing brand-new bike-lanes; and barbarian red-meat politics like shutting down libraries in already underserved areas.
Releasing a $2 app to complain about graffiti is pretty much perfect Rob Ford -- the only thing that could make it more Fordian is if it made fart noises.
Chris Bateman reports on BlogTO:
"This is as efficient as it gets," remarked Ford at press conference earlier today. "This will make it easier than ever to report graffiti vandalism and help keep the city spotless.
Standing in front of local residents busily painting over tags on garage doors, Ford pointed to a bridge on Scarlett Road near Lambton Golf Club as a clean-up success story he hopes to replicate across the city. "Once people know we mean business, the people that are causing this mess are going to learn a tough lesson," he declared.
The app, which costs $1.99 (and is currently only available for iPhone), lets Apple smartphone users send photographs directly to the city with a request to remove of the offending material. If the property owner fails to clean up the tag, the city will - so they say - step in and bill the owner for the work.
Will anyone use Toronto's new anti-graffiti app?
(Image: downsized, cropped thumbnail from a photo by Mariam Matti)
By Cory Doctorow at 12:17 pm Saturday, Mar 24
• Comments • Share
Colin Dickey introduces the current Lapham’s Quarterly collection of rude and complaining messages left by monks in the margins of medieval manuscripts, a subject covered in detail in Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, Michael Camille's 2004 book.
Depictions of sexual consort are frequent, among men and women, among various species of animals, and enough other combinations to make even contemporary readers blush. Camille cautions against reading such images as violations of the sacred text; because the medieval world was so rigidly hierarchized and structured, “resisting, ridiculing, overturning and inventing was not only possible, it was limitless.” That these psalters and books of hours often contained sacrilegious sentiments right alongside their holy piety, it seems, was perhaps the point: “We should not see medieval culture exclusively in terms of binary oppositions—sacred/profane, for example, or spiritual/worldly,” Camille explains. “Travesty, profanation, and sacrilege are essential to the continuity of the sacred in society.”
Living in the Margins
By Cory Doctorow at 7:22 am Tuesday, Mar 20
• Comments • Share
Noordijk sez, "Egyptian graffiti artists make this military street barrier 'disappear.'"
Sheikh Rihan mural
No more hope. LA-based street artist Shepard Fairey today
entered a guilty plea in his criminal case with the Associated Press. He's facing a maximum sentence of six months in prison. The criminal case concerns not the intellectual property dispute itself, but charges of "criminal contempt for destroying documents, manufacturing evidence and other misconduct" in the civil case, which was settled out of court with AP.
— Xeni
By Cory Doctorow at 12:06 pm Tuesday, Feb 7
• Comments • Share
Sculptor Mark Jenkins's "City" series is comprised of lifelike mannequins placed in public spaces in odd postures, often in seeming distress or danger, usually with a broadly humorous undertone. They're pretty funny stuff. Shown here: "Barcelona Trashgirl."
City
(via kikirikipics)
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 8:15 am Monday, Feb 6
• Comments • Share
This bit of graffiti, spotted by entomologist and photographer Alex Wild, seems like the perfect way to start off a Monday morning. Thanks, anonymous tagger! I feel better already!
By Cory Doctorow at 9:17 am Sunday, Jan 22
• Comments • Share
Chrisperfer sez, "I randomly came upon this Isaac Asimov graffiti when attending a birthday party in Rome for my 4 year old daughter's friend."
Isaac Asimov
By Cory Doctorow at 6:21 am Friday, Nov 25
• Comments • Share
Tim Maughan's self-published short story collection Paintwork collects three of his stories, including the British Science Fiction Award-nominated story "Havana Augmented."
In an era of "post-cyberpunk" science fiction, Maughan is firmly cyberpunk -- or maybe "cyberpunk++," a genre that captures all the grit and glory of technology with a higher degree of plausibility and respect for real computers and networks than the genre had in its glory days.
"Paintwork," the first story, is a noirish, Gibsonian story of a graffiti writer in an econopocalypse-scoured Bristol, whose specialty is elaborate augmented reality animations that he inserts into the public consciousness by overwriting the QR codes on advertisements. "Paparazzi" is a story of gaming celebrity and global economics, with a wry and funny take on gold-farming that went to a place no other writer has ventured. The final novella, "Havana Augmented," is justly famed as Maughan's best work today: a political games/AR thriller set in Havana, where a bootleg augmented reality mecha combat game becomes part of the Communist Party's plan to liberalize the country's economy, and the young rebel gamers who are caught up in the plot.
Maughan has a keen eye for the fictional possibilities of technology, a good hand with the what if/ten seconds in the future mode of storytelling, and he's quite adept at filling his work with hyper-cool eyeball kicks. These stories are fun and thought-provoking, a great combination.
Paintwork
By Cory Doctorow at 12:21 pm Tuesday, Nov 8
• Comments • Share
This week, San Francisco municipal election posters have sprouted Occupy-chic "corrections."
Political Posters Defiled Day Before Election Day
(via JWZ)
(Image: downsized, cropped thumbnail from a photo by John Johnson)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:17 pm Friday, Aug 26
• Comments • Share
Responding to the
death of Jack Layton, head of Canada's New Democratic Party and a former Toronto City Councillor, Torontonians thronged Nathan Phillips Square, a large public space in front of New City Hall, and chalked memorial messages over every surface.
Remembering Jack Layton at Nathan Phillips Square
(Thanks, Emily!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:02 pm Thursday, Aug 25
• Comments • Share
Tim sez,
This weekend saw the final unveiling of the the See No Evil project in Bristol; Europe's largest street art exhibition. It is, to say the very least, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement. Graffiti artists not just from Bristol but around the globe descended on Nelson Street, transforming the whole area from drab, urban decay into what feels like a new -- almost virtual -- space...
The science fictional aspect of See No Evil becomes even more heightened when you consider the history of Nelson Street. It is yet another example, amongst the hundreds that dot the urban landscape of Britain, of 1950/60s post war planning and architecture that aimed to herald a new, futuristic, technology-driven utopia. But of course the future's greatest strength is that it can never be predicted and tamed, let alone designed or planned. The town planners and architects failed, and as the decades passed they watched their dreams descend into decay, shunned by popular taste and left to become associated with poverty, depravation and failure. And to add the ultimate insult to their injuries, they saw their utopian designs become the defining science fiction image of a dystopian future.
From utopia to dystopia and back again – See No Evil, Bristol
(
Thanks, Tim!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:12 am Wednesday, Aug 3
• Comments • Share
What a great appreciation for Calvin and Hobbes: a little street art of the pair sliding down a public stair-railing.
calvin & hobbes (it's summer holidays....)
(
via Neatorama)
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
