Poster Boy acts as a poster child
New York City police claim to have captured Poster Boy last week. Poster Boy is the title that has been given to an elusive ad-defacing subway artist.
He creates anti-consumerism collages with advertisements. Posters for “Iron Man” were altered to read “Iran=Nam,” and in an advertisement for Puma shoes, featuring Jamaican Olympian Usain Bolt, a headline advertising McDonald’s reading “McDorse the world,” was added.
There is debate as to whether or not the arrested 27-year-old from Brooklyn, Henry Matyjewicz, is actually Poster Boy. Many claim Poster Boy is in fact multiple artists, but that is not the important issue.
What America should be enraged about is the fact that there is a warrant out for Poster Boy at all.
New York City has a zero-tolerance policy for petty crime. Therefore, graffiti has been banned from subway trains.
Would-be graffiti artists have been reduced to a new art, “scratchiti,” which are etchings into windows and bodies of trains.
Poster Boy took the common tool of scratchiti artists, the razor blade, and ingeniously used it to produce creative political art.
The only good thing about his arrest is the attention given to this renegade hero.
Poster Boy is taking control of his environment, which is something to be admired in this era. In an age of uncertainty and economic collapse, we should be questioning old standards. Change will not happen unless we become an active society instead of a passive one.
Larry Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, stated we were in a “read-only” society in 2006. Three years later, we are still the same. What we need to become is a “read/write” society, a society that enables people to shape their own environment.
We need to become less focused on copyright and authorship by realizing it is far more important to share our creativity. By sharing, we can learn and become inspired, which will enhance our own creative efforts.
We will also be able to freely collaborate through reusing and remixing each other’s materials. We would have control, which we do not have now. We are forced to only read whatever is thrust into our public space. Legally we are not allowed to alter it.
Graffiti, for instance, is labeled as illegal because it is vandalism of property, but isn’t public space the property of taxpayers? Why should we be force-fed advertisements by corporations? It is our space. We should be able to manipulate it to our liking.
Let’s applaud Poster Boy for not being passive. An overwhelming need to arrest this man exists only because he did not sit idly by. Do we really want to live in a society that is so opposed to active citizenship?
A Pendulum columnist, Anna Zavala, previously wrote about consumer ownership. She felt the question was not about which is better, sole ownership or socialist sharing, but about which our society is moving toward.
“One system will never completely take over the other,” she said.
What if one of the systems controls the entire society? Ownership is in the hands of a select few, the CEOs of media conglomerates.
Are we content to let them dictate our lives, or do we want to create our own?
He creates anti-consumerism collages with advertisements. Posters for “Iron Man” were altered to read “Iran=Nam,” and in an advertisement for Puma shoes, featuring Jamaican Olympian Usain Bolt, a headline advertising McDonald’s reading “McDorse the world,” was added.
There is debate as to whether or not the arrested 27-year-old from Brooklyn, Henry Matyjewicz, is actually Poster Boy. Many claim Poster Boy is in fact multiple artists, but that is not the important issue.
What America should be enraged about is the fact that there is a warrant out for Poster Boy at all.
New York City has a zero-tolerance policy for petty crime. Therefore, graffiti has been banned from subway trains.
Would-be graffiti artists have been reduced to a new art, “scratchiti,” which are etchings into windows and bodies of trains.
Poster Boy took the common tool of scratchiti artists, the razor blade, and ingeniously used it to produce creative political art.
The only good thing about his arrest is the attention given to this renegade hero.
Poster Boy is taking control of his environment, which is something to be admired in this era. In an age of uncertainty and economic collapse, we should be questioning old standards. Change will not happen unless we become an active society instead of a passive one.
Larry Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, stated we were in a “read-only” society in 2006. Three years later, we are still the same. What we need to become is a “read/write” society, a society that enables people to shape their own environment.
We need to become less focused on copyright and authorship by realizing it is far more important to share our creativity. By sharing, we can learn and become inspired, which will enhance our own creative efforts.
We will also be able to freely collaborate through reusing and remixing each other’s materials. We would have control, which we do not have now. We are forced to only read whatever is thrust into our public space. Legally we are not allowed to alter it.
Graffiti, for instance, is labeled as illegal because it is vandalism of property, but isn’t public space the property of taxpayers? Why should we be force-fed advertisements by corporations? It is our space. We should be able to manipulate it to our liking.
Let’s applaud Poster Boy for not being passive. An overwhelming need to arrest this man exists only because he did not sit idly by. Do we really want to live in a society that is so opposed to active citizenship?
A Pendulum columnist, Anna Zavala, previously wrote about consumer ownership. She felt the question was not about which is better, sole ownership or socialist sharing, but about which our society is moving toward.
“One system will never completely take over the other,” she said.
What if one of the systems controls the entire society? Ownership is in the hands of a select few, the CEOs of media conglomerates.
Are we content to let them dictate our lives, or do we want to create our own?
Updated February 17, 2009
