So I was living in that building when they put up the banner. Actually, I was lying in my underwear in bed when the guys putting it up drilled it into the wall directly outside my window (the one next to the bottom left hand corner of the banner).
I took it as one more sign that the East Village has become one big Starbucks -- a pantheon of ads and corporate chains. Solution?: I moved to Brooklyn.
GVSHP and the East Village Community Coalition had long called upon the city to take action against the billboard which violated zoning regulations and, which some argued, violated an agreement to maintain the community mural for 10 years. Following complaints about the billboard from GVSHP and many others, and a great deal of attention from blog EV Grieve, the City inspected the site, issued several violations, and scheduled hearings on the violations. The sign was finally removed in late March.
[H]e's making quite a statement with his first-ever ad campaign for his lower-priced line T. "The energy was much more appropriate for something like guerrilla marketing than anything too proper or formal," Wang says of the ads which will only grace NYC sidewalks, not the pages of the magazines currently stocked at your local newsstand.
[F]or the month of January, Show Media, a Las Vegas company that owns about half the cones adorning New York City’s taxis, has decided to give commerce a rest. Instead, roughly 500 cabs will display a different kind of message: artworks by Shirin Neshat, Alex Katz and Yoko Ono.
[F]or the month of January, Show Media, a Las Vegas company that owns about half the cones adorning New York City’s taxis, has decided to give commerce a rest. Instead, roughly 500 cabs will display a different kind of message: artworks by Shirin Neshat, Alex Katz and Yoko Ono.
The project is costing Show Media about $100,000 in lost revenue, but John Amato, one of Show’s owners and a contemporary-art fan, said: “I thought it was time to take a step back. January’s a slow month. I could have cut my rates but instead I decided to hit the mute button and give something back to the city.”
For nine years, cats and dogs loomed large over a parking lot on Avenue A as part of an iconic Advocates for Animals mural on the side of a tenement building in Manhattan's East Village. Created by well-known local muralist Chico, the mural tugged at the heartstrings with an assortment of animals — including a sweet kitty with pleading eyes and a trusty German Shepherd — urging local residents to spay and neuter their pets, and providing a number to call for assistance.
But the mural, which can be seen in the opening moments of the 2005 film "Winter Passing," was whitewashed this fall and replaced with an ad for 2K Sports' NBA 2K10 basketball video game, and now NBA superstar Kobe Bryant looms large on the wall.
For her part, Irene Muschel, a social worker and animal activist who runs Advocates for Animals, and hired Chico to paint the mural back in April 2000, didn't even know it had been covered up until MEDIA contacted her.
Muschel claimed that the landlord of 189 Avenue A, Desides Weinberg, was contractually obligated — "We had a legal contract drawn up by an attorney and signed by me, Chico and the landlord" — to keep the Animals for Advocates mural up for 10 years. If that's the case, the mural should have stayed in place until April 2010. "About a year ago, the landlord that signed the contract called me about how he needed income, and he said there was an advertiser who wanted to put something up there, and would I go along with it," Muschel recalls. "I said no, actually, and I had contacted a lawyer. But then it just faded away."
For his part, Weinberg repeatedly insisted that the contract Muschel speaks of was a "phony contract." He also faulted Muschel for not properly maintaining the mural, pointing out that chunks of it had fallen off the side of the building over the years.
One has to wonder: Did New York-based KD&E Advertising, which did the media buy for the NBA 2K10 campaign, realize the ad would replace a mural that had special meaning to East Village residents? KD&E did not return calls or respond to efforts made to reach someone at the agency on MEDIA's behalf by a representative for 72andsunny, the creative agency on the campaign.
Muschel says she is not going to pursue the matter legally or otherwise, instead choosing to focus on the good the mural did. "The mural helped a great many animals get spayed and neutered and provided answers on a wide variety of animal issues to people who called," she muses. "It did its work."
