The Reality-Show-Industrial-Complex continues to warp everyone’s perception of reality with its brain cell melting fusillade of advertising everywhere you turn. Street billboards, banner ads, barking taxi cab screens, and bone-headed subway posters spill bilious candy coated banality upon bystanders and passersby with entreaties to experience the misadventures of buxom babes and the buff boys who bang them.
You have to wonder how these funhouse images affect the self-perception of girls and boys and women and men who are surrounded daily by them. You will not escape the visual assault as you ride captive on the trains to your job or school or museum or library or the unemployment office – as the vast tentacles of the entertainment industry reach ever further in search of a market.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that citizenry doesn’t talk back.
Poster Boy (photo © Jaime Rojo)
From Keith Haring in the 80s to Poster Boy (s) and LUDO and a number of non street artists in the last couple of years, there is an occasional attempt to steer the conversation, stem the tide and claim the eyeballs and attention on the subway, if just for a minute. Some artists feel that the subways are a fair playground and an instant gallery, to the chagrin of those who see their art interventions as crimes or at least, damaging to profits.
Poster Boy (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Recently we spotted a series of ads with images of the new “celebrity” class marred with the tiniest “interventions” that ring of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kreuger and even William Burroughs. Whether these are the work of Poster Boy or the Poster Boys he hoped to inspire, the placement short circuits the messaging and questions how women are being portrayed. Ultimately these little interventions are just a finger in the whole.
Poster Boy (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Poster Boy (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Poster Boy (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Poster Boy (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Other Articles You May Like from BSA:
Tony Depew, Street Artist, painter, poet This image selected is from July 6, 2018, and depicts a friend playing around on a trash can I had painted in Canton, Ohio, 2007. I had chosen this image becau...
For the 11th annual Asalto Festival in northern Spain’s Zaragoza the public art portion of cultural celebration is anything but assaulting in its content and style. In fact, the works can be compellin...
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities. Now screening : 1. Miss Van Talks about Her Show in San Francisco 2. Have You Seen The Listers? 3. Peter Phobia...
Human rights, unjust imprisonment, women’s equality, the plight of migrants and, the threats of climate change. The many pitfalls of unbridled capitalism. These have been issues that Icy & Sot hav...
"Resistance is here to stay, welcome to your 100th day" - said people in Climate Marches across the country yesterday to President Exxon-Lockheed. God, has it only been 100 days? It feels like 1,0...