The street art community has reacted to the work as a corporate invasion of their space and retaliated in spectacular style - from daubing ‘fony sony’ across the work to our personal favourite: 'I don’t want this for Christmas’. Street art site Wooster is cataloguing the various attacks on the PSP graffiti, which Sony paid genuine artists to execute. Meanwhile Wired has stirred up the debate online with a scathing article, sample text:
Advertising firms call it genius, but the word on the street is less flattering.
The Sony ads are the subject of much discussion on Flickr where the artwork can be seen 'clean’ and street art site Wooster have posted a passionate polemic on the subject.
The mainstream media (in this case the International Herald Tribune) have now picked up on the story, reporting “Sony aims at hip crowd, but bid backfires a bit”. Given that the graffiti story is a mere footnote compared to the far more damaging revelation that some of Sony’s music CDs contain illegal spyware, we would say - no kidding.
Following on from their much sneered at ‘graffiti advertisement’ earlier in the year, Time writes:
Takin’ It To The Streets. An ingenious art form is springing up in the unlikeliest city locales; galleries are noticing.
You don’t say. Broadsheets both sides of the Atlantic are picking up on this - just like in the 1980s when works by graffiti artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring sold for thousands (help along of course by Andy Warhol). Just a couple of weeks ago the Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak came over all emotional at Banksy’s latest show:
“A version of the famous Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper, features the late-night Manhattan melancholics huddled around their coffee as usual — but a British yob in Union Jack underpants has turned up on the street outside and chucked a brick through the window. It’s funny. And it’s sad. Both those qualities are surprising. I expected angry agitprop from Banksy, and cheek, but I did not expect a tear to be shed at the coarsening of Britain.”
It was also reported that Banksy had sold one painting for $40,000. Good for him. But you can’t get more establishment than the Sunday Times and photo essays in Time. Which throws up the classic question - what happens when the anti-establishment becomes the establishment? Things (hopefully) mutate.
Time story via Wooster. Picture of the completed Time graffiti billboard via Gothamist.
We wrote about the launch of Wooster Collective’s borrowable street art archive a while back. Since then Streetsy has grown daily with images handily tagged, including the rather tragic scene shown.
Nice utilisation of modern tech: camera phone + flickr +tagging = streetsy.
BigShinyThing wrote about Speto a while back. Marrying his visually arresting style to the Brahma brand is pretty smart. What’s not so cunning is putting the logo in a place where piqued street art fans can paper over it… Debranded Brahma/Speto poster spotted on the Kingsland Road (the logo is under the flyposter in the bottom right hand corner). Great ad for Speto though…
Typical of the city’s style is Speto - an illustrator/graffiti artist cum film maker who has just been commissioned to spruce up Brighton’s Ocean Rooms nightclub. See Speto’s site for more.
Street art site Wooster – a fine picking ground for BST in the past – has launched its own street photography library online.
Of course, it’s tagged and uses Flickr. Rather usefully, you can use Flickr to download images in whatever size you like – usage doesn’t have to be attributed but it’s always polite to.
Wooster says:
We’re extremely excited to announce today our latest Wooster Collective project - STREETSY, a “daily street art photography site” developed by our friend Jake Dobkin.
For years, Jake has been taking photographs of street art in Lower Manhattan and around the world. With the launch today, over 2500 photos have been uploaded and tagged. New photographs will be added to the site each day and every day.
Looking for a photograph for your site, article, or research project? All of the photos on Streetsy are being released to the public domain, and can be used in all commercial and non-commercial projects without charge.
The above photo is from the ‘cat’ tag and was taken in New York by Jake Dobkin.
Just lovely. Via Wooster (lots of Woostering this week). More of You Are Beautiful’s stuff is viewable on their site.
The Sony ads are the subject of much discussion on Flickr where the artwork can be seen 'clean’ and street art site Wooster have posted a passionate polemic on the subject. 
We wrote about the launch of Wooster Collective’s borrowable street art archive a while back. Since then Streetsy has grown daily with images handily tagged, including the rather tragic scene shown. 
We wrote about the launch of Wooster Collective’s borrowable street art archive a while back. Since then Streetsy has grown daily with images handily tagged, including the rather tragic scene shown. 
BigShinyThing wrote about Speto a while back. Marrying his visually arresting style to the Brahma brand is pretty smart. What’s not so cunning is putting the logo in a place where piqued street art fans can paper over it… Debranded Brahma/Speto poster spotted on the Kingsland Road (the logo is under the flyposter in the bottom right hand corner). Great ad for Speto though…
