Guerrilla Gofers

OK, so everybody has heard about the crazy shit that happened in Boston last week. My friend Jose sent me this blog posting of a guy commenting on it. Now this guy made some good points about the whole thing, despite being a Bostonian. He must be a transplant to the town of the intellectually challenged.

I especially liked his skewering of the media and their inability to gather any actual facts before reporting, or doing any info checking about the show on Cartoon Network that was the center of all this brouhaha.

However,

One thing that has been really getting on my nerves is that these guys have been referred to, by both this Bradley's Almanac guy and the mainstream media, as "guerrilla artists."

OK, these guys are not fucking guerrilla artists. They are a couple of low-level lackeys who went out in the middle of the night and put up a little light contraption designed by some marketing guy sitting in an office somewhere. Nobody calls the guys who paste the pictures on billboards "artists," so why would we call these guys that? Because one of them has dreads? Because they acted all weird and talked about 70s haircuts in their little press conference after getting out of jail? "Ooh you are so non sequitur and esoteric, you are such an artist. Its so deep. I wonder what the meaning of the 70s haircuts is supposed to represent? Oh, they are so creative."

Give me a fucking break. This is what happens when advertising has co-opted our entire culture. Guys who are nothing more than than a couple of agents for the corporate machine, and just a couple of errand boys at that, get labeled as artists.

This is just another sign of the way that marketing and product placement has become just another ubiquitous part of our society. The media even pointed out that it was young people who didn't think it was a big deal because they are "used to" this sort of marketing. Well, forgive me if I don't think that's a good thing. Just because they are used to it, having had advertising ingrained into their skulls since birth, doesn't make it a good thing. In fact, it is a sign of just how low our society has gotten. We expect to see advertising wherever we go and don't even shrug about it. An old sports stadium gets renamed after some corporation who buys the naming rights, and by the next day people are calling it by the new name without even thinking about it. People actually watch the Super Bowl for the commercials.

We allow ourselves to be told what's what by the PR firms of the world and then say thank you and give them our money.

We've got to start saying no more. You shouldn't be allowed to co-opt our culture for your own nefarious aims. Going out on a secret mission to plaster a city with advertisements for a cartoon doesn't make you The Living Theater. You're a lot more like Ronco.

One of the things that hasn't been mentioned in the press so much is the fact that this guerrilla marketing stunt used public property without paying for the space. It's bad enough that we are underfunding public transportation so much that they have to sell advertising on the trains and stations, but now these companies think they can do it without asking and without paying.

A couple of the bridges that these things were placed under in Boston are along a path that runs beside the Charles River, part of a public park called the Esplanade. It's one of the few long stretches in Boston where you can walk and be surrounded by a view of trees, grass, water, bridges over the river, and you don't have to be subjected to advertising. It's what a public space should be about.

And these ass holes decided it was OK to ruin that experience for people because the Cartoon Network gave them a few bucks. I hope they, and the guys on Madison Avenue that thought this marketing scheme up, get jail time. Not for what what they are charged with, which is dumb and won't hold up in court (something about a hoax to purposely cause fear or some shit), but for defacing public property.

We don't stop this and what we call art in years to come could be very scary.

"Hey have you seen the new exhibit down at MOMA? It's the newest 'Head On, Apply It Directly To Your Forehead' video sculpture. Next week we are going to go to the Met for the Mr Whipple career retrospective. Should be amazing."