Following up on earlier news that prosecutors in Boston have dropped charges against the two artists behind an LED sign campaign foolishly misinterpreted by authorities as a terrorist threat… BoingBoing reader Ted says:
It is sad that the Boston Moonite bomb scare artists had to do community service and were clearly being held to a higher standard of "planting a hoax device" than the carpenters at the New England Medical center: Link 1, Link 2 to Boston Herald article.
(Ed. Note: Right, so remember how the same day when the Boston Mooninite LED sign freakout happened, there were reports of pipe bombs at Tufts Medical Center in Boston? That's what he's talking about. Those reports were real, and the pipe bombs were not planted by the two guerilla marketing guys. OK, back to Ted…)
These other guys were ADMITTEDLY planting hoax devices to scare each other and received nothing more than that of a suspension from work. No charges, no fines. How is this possible when they were trying to make them look as real and menacing as possible?Also not mentioned much is this fact the the bomb squids blew up a traffic counter a few days later in the financial district – after they were told – again… it's a traffic counter. yet the city takes NO responsibility for any of these actions?
Additionally, this speaks to the need for more "education" of the community at large and the need for more public art. Seems like public art is headed the way of the dodo in our communities as we can't have art that could be a public hazard… maybe we should start allocating money to send public officials to Burningman to see what dangerous art really could be.
And as a friend reminded me last night, those Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED signs had been placed in a number of other cities, including LA, in weeks prior. Nowhere else did authorities overreact as they did in Boston. And in none of those cities do law enforcement officers run around blowing up traffic counters, either.
Previously on BoingBoing:
Reader comment: Fred Scharmen, aka sevensixfive says,
I'm really glad that you guys keep following up on the Boston Mooninite thing at BoingBoing. But I think there's at least one more angle on this story that for some reason keeps getting lost: these guys are not artists, and this is not art. It's advertising that's using the tactics of street art to spread a message, and there's something really evil about that.
In street art there's a strong tradition of 'giving it away', it's out there in the public space, freely viewed by everybody, and can't easily get hauled off into a gallery and sold (witness REVS, for instance). Street art also has historically turned the methods of public advertising against the institutions that support it, I'm thinking specifically of some of the billboard hacks executed by Mark Pauline of SRL before he got into robots.
That Berdovsky and Stevens took money (not even that much money, suckers) from a guerilla marketing outfit to put these things up, and then tried to link them with other, better work by the Graffiti Research Lab is outrageous. They're colonizing a space cleared by artists with a marketing message. Evil. I'm really glad they're not getting charged with criminal wrongdoing, but please stop calling them 'artists', maybe start using 'shills', 'touts' or even 'suckers' instead.
I've written more about this here, if you're interested: Link.
BoingBoing reader says,
Fred Scharmen is right that in some way the guys who were busted for ATHF marketing are in some way different than artists who are simply something for the sake of art, but he's totally full of crap to claim that by taking money they're no longer considered artists. The fact that they're working for those in power and not against doesn't change the fact that they're artists. Artists take money all the freaking time. You think the Mona Lisa was painted for free? Advertising campaigns employ all sorts of artists all the time. Sure a logo isn't as high minded as a Mondrian, but it's still within the broad category of art. That said, calling them marketers might still be more appropriate, but isn't wrong.
