Urban artist SABER has discovered a new place to put his graffiti: the sky. In an effort to protest a mural moratorium imposed by the Los Angeles City Council, the SoCal street-scrawler tagged the skies above his city with cryptic messages like “Upperplayground,” “Art Work Rebels,” “Art Is Not A Crime,” “End Mural Moratorium,” and in a nod to fellow graffiti-maker, Shepard Fairey, “Obey.” SABER’s skywriting project comes on the heels of MoCA’s Art in the Streets exhibit, and addresses LA’s contradictory practices of sanctioning huge billboards for ads while prohibiting large-and-small-scale murals. According to LATaco.com, the campaign is an effort to get more people to sign a petition ending the mural moratorium. As SABER claims, “Los Angeles was once the ‘Mural Capital of the World’ and [the] city should claim that title again!” See more skywriting after the jump.
Last weekend, 41-year-old Shepard Fairey, who created the HOPE poster now synonymous with the President’s 2008 campaign, was attacked by Danish left-wing radicals outside a nightclub after the opening of his exhibition in Copenhagen. The angry men called him “Obama illuminati” and left him with a black eye and a bruised rib. Like any good street artist used to skirting the law, Fairey refused to go to the cops, so it was only this weekend that the Guardian got the scoop.
Earlier this month, Fairey completed a controversial mural in Denmark commemorating the demolition of the left-wing community base, “Ungdomshuset” at Jagtvej 69. The mural, while promoting peace, enraged many members of the community. Hours after its completion, it was vandalized with graffiti saying ‘no peace’ and ‘go home, Yankee hipster.’ ”The media reported that it was commissioned by the city, which wasn’t true,” Fairey told the Guardian. ”It looked to the people at 69 like I was cooperating with the authorities, making a propaganda piece to smooth over the wound.” So he tried to promote peace with his art but managed to offend the people he was trying to support enough that they ambushed him and beat him up? All we can say is, Fairey, you Obama-loving hipster, don’t bring any of that peace and harmony stuff to our town.
As our fifth youngest president celebrates his birthday with cheers from sea to shining sea, we made him a present in honor of his 50th. The Internet, as it turns out, is full of Barack Obama-inspired art, and we got it right here — Obama paintings, Obama acid tabs, Obama graffiti and street art, Obama made out of breakfast cereal, butter and gumballs, Obama sponge-bathing nude with a unicorn… We think since Shepard Fairey’s mega-popular HOPE poster is too thoroughly entangled with the president’s image, we’ll leave him out and mix it up a bit. Here are fifty impressive, creative, and WTF?! works of art in the image of our Prez.
Graffiti may have been around for decades, but thanks to artists like Banksy and Swoon, street art has achieved new cultural significance — which means that, for many of us, some of the most stunning works of modern art are just around the corner. Of course, the city is a big place, so unless you spend your days wandering the back-roads and alleys, it’s easy to miss some of your local street-art masterpieces. That’s why we’ve teamed with Havaianas to create an extremely handy guide to a selection of the amazing artwork in NYC, LA, and Miami that doesn’t need a museum to shine — inspired by the brand’s new limited-edition Graffiti sandals. Check out a gallery of images from the guide here, then click through for the whole thing, including printable maps.
It’s summer, which means we’re doing more than our usual amount of bookstore browsing in the many air-conditioned shops in the greater New York area. Of course, half the fun of browsing is coming across books you’ve never heard of and picking them up, usually solely based on the covers, and for some reason we’ve noticed that we’ve been picking up a lot of big blue eyes recently. If eyes are the windows to the soul, as many people with eye tattoos have told us, does that mean we can see a book’s soul through them too? Or is that our own soul being reflected back to us? Maybe neither, but at the very least, we find book covers with eyes rather, okay, eye-catching, which is in many ways the goal of a well-designed jacket. So click through to see 25 well-designed book covers, new and old, that draw us in with their stares, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of J.D. Salinger’s much-beloved novel, The Catcher in the Rye. The book has been much argued over in the years since its publication, but no one can deny that it has influenced countless artists, writers and troubled teenagers and had a lasting impact on American culture. Holden is in many ways the original angsty American teen, sex-obsessed and confused, and as a tribute to the occasion of his 60th (or should we say, 77th?) year, we’ve collected a few of our favorite Holden variations, incarnations and iterations here. Click through to see our list of troubled teens, social dropouts, misguided misanthropes and other heirs to our dear Holden Caulfield, and let us know how the man, the myth, the legend has affected your own inner life in the comments. But, of course, don’t be phony.
It looks like downtown New York just got a little more Shepard Fairey; the ubiquitous OBEY artist — who was in town promoting the paperback release of Steven Heller’s Big Lie and Little Truth, Graphic Design and Propaganda in Branding — has been working on a huge stencil at Bowery and Rivington for the past few days. As The Measure notes, the location of this new piece is “the building that houses Sue Scott Gallery — two blocks south of the new JR photo mural where Fairey’s work was thoroughly defaced a couple years ago.” Click through to get a better look at the work-in-progress. Any bets on how long this one will last?
America’s most famous street artist, Shepard Fairey, has always been a big music fan. As he mentions on his website, it was album cover art — not graffiti — that first caught his attention. “Album covers conjured a euphoric association with the listening experience. Most of my earliest home-made tee shirts were stencils based on punk album covers,” he writes. Fairey channeled his love of music into REVOLUTIONS, an exhibition of original album covers, which showed in March and April at Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica.
Now, the artist is releasing the works in two 36-print box sets, each with a run of only 150 copies. Dance Floor Riot, composed mostly of revolutionary-tinged punk, New Wave, and funk images, will go on sale here some time between 10am and noon PT (that’s 1-3pm ET) today for $950. Tomorrow, collectors will have a chance to buy the scuzz-rock-and-metal-obsessed Party at the Moontower set (yes, that’s a Dazed and Confused reference) at the same time, place, and price point tomorrow. See some of our favorite works from the box sets, depicting everyone from Joan Jett to Jack White to Little Richard, after the jump.
In an interview about his newest film, Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen declared, “I wanted to show the city emotionally, the way I felt about it. It didn’t matter to me how real it was. I wanted it to be Paris through my eyes.” Inspired by the king of fantasy destination films (Vicky Christina Barcelona anyone?), we’ve created a highly subjective list — not of art that is necessarily directly representative of a specific city, nor art that is necessarily created in that city (though there are a few of each on our list), but of art that feels like our favorite cities to us, that calls up the same responses and urges, the same colors and sense memories. Please feel free to chime in with your own choices, feelings and ruminations in the comments!
