READ all about it
The Booker is making his presence known with N.O. graffiti
Art SeenCritic Doug MacCash rates New Orleans art : Wonderful, worhtwhile, whatever.
This is worthwhile
There’s an ambitious new graffiti writer in town. The first time I saw one of the big, hand-lettered READ signs that have popped up on boarded storefronts around New Orleans over the past few weeks, I thought it was a sort of public service announcement. I imagined that a neighborhood literacy activist was advising the world to hit the books, or something like that.
Who knows? The graffiti artist who paints the unadorned block letters might advocate reading, but, like all taggers, his first goal is glory. Mr. READ has hit the Crescent City hard, crushed it even, as street artists say. I’ve found tags as big as semi trucks on St. Claude Avenue, Carrollton Avenue and Canal Street, with smaller signs scattered elsewhere. It stands to reason that the spray-painted books with “xxx” on the pages are the work of the READ writer as well.
To Mr. READ’s credit, most (though not all) of the tags I’ve seen have been applied to the plywood protecting unoccupied storefronts, not to the stores themselves. The big, black-and-white tags are a bit brutal, to be sure. They certainly don’t have the lilting poetry of the Banksy graffiti that wowed the Crescent City almost a year ago. But they have a purposeful punch that places them above the usual aerosol scribbles.I recently met a Brooklyn street artist named Gaia, who knows way more than I do about the national scene. Gaia said that though he doesn’t know Mr. READ (aka Read More Books or The Booker), he believes that the ambitious tagger has hit San Francisco, Cleveland and New York, as well as New Orleans.
As an art critic, I’ve always been ambivalent about reviewing graffiti. On one hand, most graffiti remains more antisocial that artistic. On the other, graffiti is very fashionable these days, and, let’s face it, way more people see it than ever cross the threshold of an art gallery or museum. Even in museums, graffiti is making a splash. I’m told that the original version of street art star Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous Obama election poster titled “Hope” is the most popular attraction at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Fairey, who is known to paste posters in public places without permission, recently was fined $2,000 for vandalism in Boston. I’m sure he can afford the price of street cred; I recently saw hand-painted original posters by Fairey for sale at a Washington gallery for $10,000 to $25,000 each. And the two years’ probation he received might be welcome. At age 39, he doesn’t need to be out running the streets anyway.
Via:www.nola.com
