Foucault would say something about prisons.

And Starbucks coffee is burny and Macs are vastly superior to PCs.

There are artists in L.A.?

It's about as cool as naming yourself "Skullphone."

this is kindof like the time i wore a keffiya around town all day to subtly protest treatment of women in Arab nations, but then it's turn out they are, like,totally popular and sold at urban outfitters

Meanwhile, Neckface makes buy on Gannett Outdoor boards.

Perhaps he would liken the billboards overrunning LA to some form of panopticon, the skulls portraying the invisible omniscience of...something. Er.

@Ha Ha Sound: You've never seen L.A. Ink!?! That's fucking art!

For the shallow, vain and unthoughtful.

spray paint still works, too.

There's a new Misfits album?

Art is a promotion of the human condition, advertising is a promotion using the human condition.

Foucalt would say, "Heterotopia".

I'm guessing Foucault would probably float idea that the overwhelming domination of urban public visual space by the capitalist-propagandistic imagery of private commercial interests (or in non-douchebag terms: advertisements) is a concrete manifestation of the concept of socio-disciplinary architecture, which of course he explored in detail in Discipline & Punish (the Panopticon, etc.)

Even in the beginning, graffiti culture has always been at least partly about advertisement--what were the first tags if not ads for the artists? Following this logic, even buying ad space for your own artwork could be construed as somewhat transgressive--granted, it's not quite the same as tagging a subway car--or at the very least a noteworthy individual intervention into the mechanics of a largely impersonal contemporary visual landscape. Skullphone isn't really "selling out;" after all, he isn't selling anything except himself and his art (at least as far as I know). Do the law-abiding means of legally getting your art up nullify any transgression inherent in the intent? Who can say?! Advertising-as-art! Text message conceptualism! Where's my limited-edition avant-garde T-shirt?! The Ecstasy of Communication! Do robots scream Bau-oh-oh-oh-oh-audrillard! when they fuck?!

Parents, don't let your children become barely-employed former art history majors.

"Do the law-abiding means of legally getting your art up nullify any transgression inherent in the intent?"

Indeed, nobody can say. But Foucault would say yes. Capital is the postmodern apparatus of capture par excellence, swallowing up transgressive expression and turning it into ... whatever the opposite of transgression is.

Regression? More capital?

In any case, capital has always nourished itself at the teat of 'artistic' transgression. In the equation advertising-as-art (or vice versa), 'art' will always be the pole that gets neutralized and dismembered. Of course, as long as we're channeling Foucault, we ought to submit the categories of 'art' and 'advertising' themselves to a rigorous conceptual genealogy, in order to determine how, historically, the spheres of purposive artistic endeavour and remunerated craftsmanship have always served to reciprocally determine and delimit each other.

Parents, don't let your children become graduate students of philosophy, either. Not only will they pipe up with the most absurd bullshit at the most inopportune times, they'll inevitably take discussions much too seriously.

@tweaked: Agreed, mostly (and relieved, that someone else took me up on the masturbatory theorizing). I'm loathe to let Foucault have the last say in any matter regarding advertising; the rubric of the Panopticon shows its age a little bit as one tries to apply it and its extended theories of societal discipline to contemporary urban architecture and attendant trends in public visual culture, due mostly to a degree of media saturation that his theories failed to foresee.

But if you're a believer in Baudrillard:
Advertising in its new version-which is no longer a more or less baroque, utopian, or ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social interlocutors and the social virtues of communication-advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears. It realizes or, if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity; it monopolizes public life in its exhibition.... It is our only architecture today: great screens on which are reflected atoms, particles, and molecules in motion. Not a public scene or true public space but gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation, and ephemeral connection.

If you can stomach the idea that the New York City of today has fully realized these properties of hyper-reality, you'll recognize a key artistic conundrum of today; that problem to which street art (which in any of its manifestations mimics, to some extent, the forms and techniques of advertising) is partly a reaction. Self-consciously transgressive--or to use a gentler descriptor, subversive--artists have better chance of finding a sympathetic audience if they appropriate the channels of advertising (i.e. paying for electronic billboard space) than if their work sits, unviewed and irrelevant, behind the frosted glass windows of some white box in Chelsea. It is not an outright attack on the system as much an infiltration and appropriation of said system, to an end that would qualify as "artistic" (however defined) rather than simply commercial. Whether or not that renders the transgression or subversion moot, is still, unfortunately, not a yes or no question in my opinion. But I don't think it absolutely does.

Oh my god. This is embarrassing. Parents, don't have children.

Whatever Foucault said about it would be in French.

@famousauthor: And now you are my new favourite.

Ja. I'm feeling it.

Hétérotopie!

What I really, really dug when I was in NY over xmas was Damien Hirst's exhibit in Lever House. Love that guy. He used the space perfectly... just the kind of thing that makes you nearly crap your pants when you walk past it. Dream-haunting stuff that is, and I don't suppose any capitalist power of envelopment can really negate the inherent transgression of a piece like that.

This, though? Billboard, bought and paid for by 'artist?' Whether it's art or not, whether it's transgressive or not, who cares? It sucks.