Advertising vs Street Art battle rages in New York

It was bound to flare up, the mainstreaming of non-traditional media has advertising using (or looking like) street art a lot lately. Like the Vespa Street art 'vespa-head' posters and the streetart Volkswagen head response, the dance between the space reclaimers and the space-owners has turned into a war.

NYT reports about A Battle, on Billboards, of Ads vs. Art. But the street artists aren't targeting just any old poster site, they going after the wild poster people that they believe don't have permissions to poster. The examples of flyposters paid for by taxpayers, and the chalk outline symbolic language of street art has been co-opted most recently by "Snakes on a cane" for the show House which might the drop the cup runneth over by.

“We’re bombarded by ads every day,” he said. “Advertising frames the public environment as being for sale but public space is not inherently commercial.”
At 10:30, Mr. Seiler and his confederates broke up into pairs, bringing along five-gallon buckets of white paint and long-handled rollers to use to spread the paint over ads.
There were ads for drinks (Bulldog Gin, Hendrick’s Gin and Dr Pepper), movies (a comedy called “Black Dynamite,” along with a documentary about President Obama called “By the People”) and albums (“World Painted Blood” by Slayer was pasted next to “Soulbook” by Rod Stewart).
Some passers-by liked the commandolike cover-ups; an artist named Jane Gennaro, who was not connected to the project, approved of the men painting over an ad for the video game Grand Theft Auto, saying, “We need to get rid of all the visual noise.”

Some passers-by liked the commandolike cover-ups; an artist named Jane Gennaro, who was not connected to the project, approved of the men painting over an ad for the video game Grand Theft Auto, saying, “We need to get rid of all the visual noise.”

But on West 25th Street, a man chased two of the whitewashers, shouting, “I will sue you.”

In any event, the newly painted-over spots were not to remain blank for long. Within hours, men driving pickup trucks with New Jersey license plates put up new ads where the artists had obscured the old ones.

One of those men, on West 25th Street, refused to identify himself or the company he was working for, instead responding to an inquiry from a reporter with an epithet, and the directive, “Take a walk.”

See Public Ad Campaign blog for more shenanigans.