"PAINT! HAVE YOU BEEN HUFFING IT?" - Spraypaint factors prominently into
this LAT piece by Crispin Sartwell in both the topic and the likely origins of the thought process behind it.
The Advice Goddess properly reams it and Eugene Volokh ads his
sensible two cents, but this gem of illogic truly deserves a line by line treatment.
Graffiti Gets Philosophical
Defacing ads should be allowed. The medium is the billboard and the message is freedom.
By Crispin Sartwell
Graffiti and advertising have many things in common. Both convey messages by occupying public space; indeed, both are omnipresent and unavoidable. At the upper reaches of excellence both are arts, though they are more often merely puerile and annoying noise. But there are some key differences.
Advertising is designed to manipulate people,
In this context, manipulate seems to at worst mean "present information in such a way that it clearly favors a certain interpretation by the selective presentation of information favoring an argument" - a definition by which Dr. Sartwell's column is "designed to manipulate."
whereas graffiti is essentially a pure mode of self-expression.
A pretty flattering description of the bored teenagers showing off by plastering their initials on unsuspecting flat surfaces that composes most graffiti, not to mention the more nefarious "pure self-expression" involved in marking gang turf.
Advertising is encouraged or courted by the authorities. Graffiti is illegal. And here is the difference that makes sense of all the others: money. All the legitimacy of advertising derives from the money that is paid to post it and the revenue it generates.
On the other hand graffiti is, in every sense, free and hence criminal.
Uh, what about the person who has to pay to have it sandblasted off the side of the building? Hell. it's not even free for the graffitist unless he stole the spraypaint.
In fact, law enforcement is often called on to defend advertisements from graffiti.
Law enforcement being called on to stop things that are illegal
!? Has the world gone mad!?
Advertising is the public expression of wealthy people and organizations. Graffiti is the public expression of people who are more or less broke. And that is exactly why advertising is authorized and graffiti is eradicated.
Really, because I had been under the impression that vandalism laws are content-neutral. Advertising is authorized because the advertisers get the permission of the person who the medium belongs to before plastering their logo onto it.
The relationships of graffiti and advertising, art and vandalism, expression and manipulation, freedom and money, have been explored systematically since the mid-1980s by artist Ron English. His chosen medium is the billboard: He and his assistants, in broad daylight, repaint public billboards with subversive messages, a procedure for which they have faced arrest several times.
See above comment about how shocking and disturbing it is that people doing illegal things attract their share of negative attention from law enforcement.
English, who started making these sorts of works in Texas and later moved to New York, subscribes to the basic spirit of art as vandalism by using graffiti styles and engaging in the politics of tagging.
Some examples of English's work:
• a smiling Jesus holding a bottle of Budweiser, with the slogan "The King of the Jews for the King of Beers";
I don't know if this was his intent, but that mental image made me thirsty for a bottle of frosty domestic pilsner and I'm an atheist.
• "Forever Kool," a toe-tagged corpse over a Kool cigarette logo;
• a series involving the "Camel Kids," child versions of the Joe Camel character;
• a scary pig-clown under the golden arches with the slogan "McDonald's, Better Living Through Chemistry";
• "Jesus drove an SUV, Mohammed pumped his gas. Hummer: Not Your Daddy's War Wagon."
Quick and Simple Art Recipe:
1 Part Religious Imagery
1 Part Consumer Culture
1 Joint
Juxtapose Religious Imagery and Consumer Culture. Bake thoroughly and garnish with pretension.
Art of this kind has been called "culture jamming," and it is designed not only to convey a message critical of existing advertisements but to make people see advertising differently, to think about the fact that advertising systematically distorts the nature and effects of the products it promotes.
Not just distorts, "systematically distorts." Remember, it's not important whether the adverb means anything, it just important that it's there.
Once you drive by one of English's signs, you are going to start seeing conventional billboards differently.
"Advertising agencies are mercenaries," English told me via e-mail from his home in New York. "It's about profit. Is the product good for the environment? Society? The individual consumer? We employ the same techniques and pirate the same spaces as the advertisers, but to different ends. Our efforts are a pure expression of free speech.
And who better to guide you in your purchasing decisions than Mr. English. And how is it a "pure expression of free speech" to cover up someone else's speech with your own drivel?
"I consider my work content. Think of TV. You have to endure a few commercials, sure, but that's not why you watch. You watch for the content. I'm creating the same concept with billboards."
English also makes more conventional easel paintings: One of the most notorious is an American flag assembled out of dollar bills. Others make strange and subversive use of cultural icons such as the Teletubbies, Mickey Mouse, Kiss, Marilyn Monroe and Ted Kennedy.
I wonder how Mr. English would react if I used his techniques and pirated his spaces to a different ends by painting over his Marilyn Monroe themed works with pictures of him pleasuring himself with the aid of a can of Campbell's Soup?
I don't completely endorse English's politics — which strike me as fundamentally conventional
I have to give Dr. Sartwell credit for getting one thing right - Mr. English would need a time machine to find someone who thinks his work is original. It's the pretentious Marxist equivalent of drawing devil horns and mustaches on portraits.
— and for what it's worth, I myself smoke and own a Dodge Durango. And I am not proposing, for example, state restrictions on advertising. But what I do endorse is the art of graffiti and the concept of culture jamming. If advertisers feel free to monopolize public space — from highways to the airwaves to the Internet — with their commercial messages, we ought to feel free to deface these messages, critique them and replace them with our own.
The tags that appear everywhere all the time in Los Angeles and elsewhere are themselves a form of cultural jamming: a seizure of space for art and a demonstration that public expression is illegal when it's free.
Yes, we need to draw on other people's property because the internet is hopelessly monopolized by advertisers. The only free speech is the kind you buy a can of at the hardware store. If only things were different and there was somebody was giving away free web space to post our opinions, possibly in the format of a personal log, things might be different. Alas, that is but a dream and I must now leave to express myself the only way I can, by spraypainting my initials on an overpass.
JESUS AND JUNK SCIENCE- The InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), a faith-based program that some have been claiming to be a successful way to reduce criminal recidivism by providing somewhat standard rehabillitation solutions of life-skills, mentoring, and work in a faith-focused environment. Unfortunately, anybody who has taken a basic stastics class can see that the study shows no such thing. The numbers thrown around by some of the program's advocates are based on the recidivism rates of graduates of the program, but graduating from the program more or less requires a successful transition to post-prison life, while the recidivism rates for those who attempted the program, regardless of whether they went all the way through, are about equal to the comparison group - clear and simple selection bias. Mark Kleiman tears it appart here and Eugene Volokh is skeptical but still entirely too charitable here and here. The study itself is here
What caught my eye about the report is that the authors seem to have tried very hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that the program is ineffective without doing anything blatantly misleading and thus manage to produce no real "conclusion" whatsoever. Rather than fudge and cite the graduates statistic to come to say the program works or cite the participant statistic and admit it doesn't, the study just throws both out there and leaves it at that in it's executive summary. The rest of the study evades directly assessing the program's efficacy as well by avoiding mentioning the implications of the participant statistic, making several relatively uninformative comparision between the graduate statistic and other groups, and bringing up the question of why the graduate group shows less recidivism and the possibility of selection bias, only to shift to ancedotal evidence about the program's impacts on participants before answering the hard questions. The team's real conclusion is buried on page 21: "Though the evaluation team still believes that IFI’s definition of what it takes to be a program
graduate is too restrictive, these additional analyses reduce somewhat our concern that the IFI graduate classification
significantly skews the findings in favor of those IFI participants who complete the entire program." Unfortunately, their additional analyses are at best a very partial correction, compensating only for the immediate effects of the first 3-months of post-prison treatment, making even "somewhat" too kind.
[Post redacted for sake of pseudoanonymity.]
