Painterly Mayhem

After a tantalizing article on the Splasher(s) - one or more anti-street artists who use buckets of paint to quickly buff various works of what they consider "mainstream" street art - the New York Times printed this gem about the arrest of one possible Splasher.

Is OBEY/Andre the Giant "mainstream?" Is Wooster Collective? Are they really promoting gentrification and hipsterism, or are they good art, good graffiti, by good artists? How is Swoon hurting "real" or "street" or "non-mainstream" art? Someone, please explain this to me...

From the Times:

Two days after Mr. Cooper’s arrest, a group of people showed up at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea, where a reception was being held for Mr. Fairey. Without identifying themselves, they distributed copies of a 16-page tabloid with the title “If we did it this is how it would’ve happened,” with a cover photograph of an image created by Mr. Fairey defaced with paint.

Inside were reproductions of the communiqués that were pasted next to the sites of many paint attacks and appeared to draw inspiration from the writings by the Situationists, a group of political and artistic agitators formed in the 1950s, and a 1960s anarchist group called Black Mask.

In often bombastic language those fliers condemned the commercialization of art and included statements saying that the wheat paste used to affix the fliers had been mixed with shards of glass. An essay in the paper given out at the gallery scoffed at those who had difficulty understanding the fliers and added footnotes clarifying parts of them. One footnote stated that the tabloids had been dusted with anthrax.

Dear Reader, we beseech you, ask yourself, ask everyone: Are hip white graffiti dudes really worthy of death-by-anthrax, or, as in the recent attempt on Fairey, by bombing? Is there a better way to stop [what is perceived as] artistic gentrification? Is Shepard Fairey really preventing kids from the hood from making art? Aren't we all - Fairey and random graf kids alike - fighting for the right to dissent, to change and improve an ugly, mainstream world?

If any Splashers out there want to be part of our Conversations series, give us a call. I'd love to produce the first no-cops-allowed debate about art. Just... be easy on the anthrax.