The walls surrounding the VICE UK offices are like nectar to a hummingbird for graffiti artists. I guess it's our fault for having an office on the route of seemingly every street art walking tour in London, but it's impossible to get into work without seeming some hamfisted political statement thrown up on a wall between an ad-agency and the development site of a forthcoming Byron burger.
On Noisey: We Interviewed A Bunch of Black Metal Cats
Over time you become immune to the Mickey Mouses with Enron-logo eyes and "Capitalism" written in the shape of the Coca-Cola logo. But today I saw one of the worst bits of graffiti I have ever seen, on the wall on the sandwich shop around the corner. This is graffiti so bad that it needs to be deeply, deeply analyzed, graffiti so bad we maybe need to question whether graffiti as a concept is now over, that it is resolutely dead, that from now on we should ban graffiti, not because it is anti-social or effects housing prices or any other ridiculous reason for being dismayed by graffiti, but because graffiti is Extremely Bad And Must Be Stopped.
I mean, just look at the state of this:
Yeah: That's a starved-looking kid in a tin bathtub holding an Oscar. Yeah: That's a social commentary on the whitewashing on the Oscars. You hear that, The Academy? Do you fucking hear this piece of stenciled graffiti on the side of a sandwich shop in east London? A sandwich shop called B.L.T., or Big, Loaded, Tasty, which sadly closed late last year because gentrification is the greatest threat to our bacon sandwiches since foot and mouth? Do you even consult what is spray-painted on the side of a closed down and sorely missed sandwich shop in London when you announce your nominations?Did you even stop to consider that a graffiti artist called Pegasus would take two hours and several carefully taped up bits of printed-at-home stenciling to blow your white little insular world apart? No you didn't. But I did.
So let us dive into the tin bathtub of this so-blunt-it's-like-opening-a-can-of-beans-with-a-baseball-bat artistic message, here, and consider: what is it saying? Who is it for? And how close is the graffiti artist Pegasus to a coffee table book and a popular range of mugs and posters?
THE DECISION TO TURN THE "S" IN "OSCAR" INTO A DOLLAR SIGN
If you thought this was just a searing indictment of the racial inequality in this year's key Oscars nominations for this key awards then you'd be wrong, idiot. Lean in and look closely, get near it and squint: the "S" in "Oscars" has been—ever so subtly—transformed into a dollar sign with the addition of a single stroke, blowing your tiny fool mind to pieces. You can see Pegasus, at home, with his copy of Photoshop and his laser printer, can't you? "Hmm," he's thinking, "how can I make this piece of wall art even more woke?" And then it hits him: The Oscars are about money. Films are about money. Money is bad. Dollars are the American money. Maybe there is a way to dilute this extremely basic entry-level opinion about the Oscars. Maybe there is a way to distract from the core message that is dominating Oscar-related headlines and throw in a little jab about the fine American dollar in there, too. Maybe there is a way to make the Academy aware that we are onto them and their money-liking ways. And he selects the "S," and goes to the font drop down, and—ever so slowly—changes it to a $. "Heh," Pegasus says. "Boom."
THE NEED FOR A CAPTION IN THE FIRST PLACE
There is a reason nobody on earth likes political cartoons, and that is because they are essentially all diagrams of a hand holding a hammer with the label "THE BAD THING" and then something that is being squashed by the hammer—migrant family, favored political leader of the newspaper in question, a puppy—labeled "THE GOOD THING," all against an inexplicable desert background, and then you look at that and go: Ah, I see now how the bad thing is in opposition to the good thing, and now I understand thoroughly this complex political issue. And there is a big cartoonist signature on the bottom, all faux ink splodges and a self-given nickname like "Jarv." Wait, look, I can do one myself:
from VICE http://ift.tt/1Uqyq9S
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment