Corporate Graffiti

Monday, we noted that the police have arrested a man accused of tagging Wallingford and many other neighborhoods with a spraypainted “Zeb”. We’ve always had a bit of short-fuse for tagging, a form of graffiti in which the practitioner spraypaints or marks his name over huge numbers of pieces of private property. The most infuriating aspect of tagging is that city law requires the property owner to bear the cost of the removal of the mark and will fine the owner stiffly if he or she doesn’t comply quickly.

But no, the point of this post is not to re-open that “is graffiti / tagging art” debate. That particular horse, dead though she may be, has been flogged clean to the bone. Instead, we wanted to highlight a comment Dane left on our Zeb post:

I don’t like graffiti, and feel the same about billboards, which look like corporate graffiti to me. how come taggers get jail time for forcing us to look at their brands but billboard advertisers get profit for putting their brands in our faces?? I think it was Mother Jones who said something like: I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

It’s easy to answer Dane if we stick to the literal, but there are some interesting gray areas. For example, the Adult Swim ad that was painted on the side of the Pizza Eleni / Slave to the Needle building at 45th and 4th Ave (photo at right), we were told, technically violated the law, too. Billboard advertising is limited to certain areas, and, in this case, would only have been legal if Adult Swim were operating out of the building on which the sign had been painted (again, so we’re told…we’re no legal scholar).

That sign has since been removed, but there’s a new bit of decoration on the west side of the same building:

No, obviously, while there are no brand names, it doesn’t take a college student to identify the can as PBR and the art as part of the PBR-sponsored ad campaign. A billboard from the same campaign, this one designed by Seattle artist Scott Ricketts, can be see on 45th and Roosevelt, above the Texaco.

So PBR paid to have something painted on a wall. Is it art? Is it advertising? Does it matter?

Again, you won’t find any legal experts here at Wallyhood, but we were told that the absence of the brand name is critical to keeping this legal, especially for an establishment that sells beer. In fact, the addition of a single additional beer sign in the Express Market window would be enough to tip the balance.

Our own politics run anti-corporate, sometimes knee-jerk so, so part of us wants to decry this encroachment of mass market advertising into our fold, a wolf in artist’s clothing. On the other hand, that was once a really, really ugly wall. It’s actually kind of beautiful now. Maybe that’s a deal we can live with.