Banksy is the Ty Pennington of graffiti artists. He can turn a £495,000 pub into a £1 million pub overnight! The auction house should consider a siloxane polymer shield, as the last time Banksy was up for sale in a real estate transation, it didn’t go so well. (Previously: Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection.)
In Tucson, artists made life-sized cutouts of Maricopa County’s anti-immigrant law enforcement officials. Really moving. (via.)
Albus Cavus just visited Dubai to paint with local artists. Diya Ajit, who collaborated with the American art collective, was interviewed about the project in Time Out Dubai: “Dubai lacks a lot of character in terms of the urban landscape. It’s very beautiful and clean, but it lacks personality – you don’t get a sense of the people that live in the city by looking in the city. I think that’s what public art does, it reflects that community within a city. It’s great to do this, but it’s been ignited by Albus Cavus, it would of course be essential eventually that we have more local artists because they know the city and have something to express about the place.”
Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Underground by Gregory Snyder, filed under “Alternative Criminology,” a taxa I’ll now seek out is reviewed in Campus Progress. (via.)
Students of Baghdad University’s College of Fine Art were hired to paint Iraq’s many concrete blast walls (”Bremer walls“.) Great photo here. Slideshow from WSJ. Video. More.
You may have read, Richard Fuld got clocked in the face while running on the treadmill at the Lehman gym the other day. But a nonviolent, actually inspired effort by artist Geoffrey Raymond allowed many former employees to (nonviolently) vent their anger. The Annotated Fuld, his painting of the disgraced Lehman Brothers CEO, sat outside Lehman Brothers headquarters collecting graffiti. He sold the painting for $10,000 but here are several other “Annotated” paintings he’s made.
Demand a Read/Write City: “Our city is read-only. You’re free to read advertising, business signs, and city signs. But dare you write or hang anything of your own; you will be labeled as a criminal - a graffiti vandal. In many cities it’s even illegal to hang a sign for a garage sale on a light pole. If you happen to have a several thousand dollars, you might be able to say what you want - as long as it’s not too political.”
Melbourne graffiti is world-famous — and protected by the government. Their city council even covered work by Banksy with perspex to keep vandals away. Now Epcot Center, in Orlando’s Disney World uses it as inspiration for their Australia exhibit: “By Disney’s schmaltzy standards, the Melbourne set is understated. Lanes covered with graffiti art are filled with cafe tables, where people sit to eat tapas-sized meals.” However, Premier John Brumby is embarrassed it is representing the country abroad, creating a countrywide debate over “street art” vs. “graffiti.”
Butterfly graffiti. Also, news on a graffiti alarm system: a “set of microphones attached to the surface is connected to a computer program that has been trained to distinguish background noise from the tell-tale signature of graffiti scratches…When the computer picks up signs of vandalism in action, it triggers an alarm to scare off the perpetrators and call the authorities to investigate.”
Did Spain’s Olympics synchronized swimming team steal their swimsuit logo from German graffiti artist CANTWO? Previously they had suits designed to look “like waterproof Christmas trees.”
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