Category: Creative Activism

Jordan Seiler’s interview with Danny Valdes on his first radio broadcast of Radio Provocateur on WVRB radio resulted in this article for The Indypendent:

Artists Reclaim Public Space: A Conversation with Public Ad Campaign Founder Jordan Seiler
by Danny Valdes
The Indypendent
January 8, 2010

Everywhere you turn in New York City, there are advertisements”” posters featuring attractive models schilling perfume, pop bands promoting their latest albums and celebrities endorsing soft drinks. The Public Ad Campaign, a collective of street artists, sees the prevalence of these advertisements as an intrusion into public space. Founded by Jordan Seiler in 2000, this group is dedicated to reclaiming the city”s sidewalks, subways and street corners by creating unauthorized public art installations. The group”s latest undertaking, an ongoing project called National Bestseller, incorporates bestselling or popular books that are taken apart and then wheat-pasted into a single sheet and installed over advertisements in phone booths.

Seiler, 31, a native New Yorker born in the Chelsea Hotel, started the Public Ad Campaign shortly after returning to New York City as a graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design. What started as a personal art project soon grew into much more of an activist-oriented effort against public advertising. As Seiler explains, the group”s mission is not to wreak havoc, but to defend the first amendment. “Public spaces are really our last democratic spaces. They are the only spaces that we have left as a society in which we all have an equal voice and can have open dialogue.”

The Indypendent”s Danny Valdes spoke with Seiler about the different ways people interact with public space and corporate advertising”s threat to the urban environment in New York City and beyond.

Danny Valdes: Is there a difference between the way art and advertising affect us in public space? Continue reading “Public Ad Campaign’s National Bestseller”