Category: Co-option (If You Can’t Beat ‘Em…)

Article from Mother Jones, May/June 2007:

Burnt By The Man
News: How copyrighting, capitalism, and lawsuit chaos disturbed the radical utopia of Burning Man.
By Josh Harkinson
Mother Jones
May/June 2007 Issue

They all burned the Man. The punk bicyclists, the drunk faeries, the people painted blue. So splendidly did Larry Harvey’s 40-foot wooden hominid burst into flame that he and his friend John Law burned the Man again, each and every year since 1986, until everybody involved””last year, nearly 40,000 of them””simply became known as Burners. And the Burners built a Bedouin arts community called Black Rock City in the Nevada desert: a tent metropolis with its own “gift economy” that banned all commerce and its own government complete with a Department of Public Works. In short, they made a new Man””though maybe not a better one.

“I think it’s something that needs to be skewered and mocked,” says Law, Burning Man’s cofounder. He quit running Burning Man a decade ago, but not before he and Harvey began selling expensive tickets to the event (last year they went for up to $350), trademarked and split ownership of the Burning Man name, and licensed it to Black Rock City llc, a for-profit, limited liability corporation run by Harvey. Law believes the corporation has become unaccountable, so he’s challenging Harvey’s oversight in a California court””quite literally putting the fate of Burning Man in the hands of “the Man.” Continue reading “Burning Man burning-out?”

From Medill Reports Chicago: Street art has moved not just to the art world, but to the world of everyday consumption

It”s not the car, it”s the graffiti selling it
by Phillip Kaplan
May 16, 2007

Graffiti and advertising are kind of like cops and robbers: eerily similar to each other yet at complete opposition.

Members of each group cross into the other with the each group usually condemning the other’s action, but sometimes covertly encouraging it. Each has a righteousness of rhetoric, and the perspective of which is “right” or “wrong” depends on what turns you on “” getting over authority or getting “bad” guys.

While advertising is meant to inform people, graffiti writing often addresses only those who can decode it.

But the advertising industry seems to think there are enough decoders out there to cater to, perhaps thinking if someone stares at some graffiti to find out the name of the artist who did it, what”s the difference if the name spells Honda? Continue reading “To tag or not to tag, that is the question”