Coming to a Phone Near You: Street Art
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: March 28, 2005
Besides good takeout, it seems there are few things now that cannot be sent
to a cellphone - games, pictures, videos, Top 40 music, live television and
soon, companies promise, full-length feature films. So why not contemporary
art?
This month, a New York-based Web site that celebrates graffiti and other
street art began testing a system to address this shortcoming by allowing
art lovers to download images created by emerging artists onto the video
screens of their cellphones. Calling it a "curated online art gallery for
your mobile phone," the founders of the Web site, woostercollective.com, are
hoping it will provide a new way for struggling young artists to make money,
in much the same way that a songwriter can earn money from radio play or an
actor from reruns.
Advertisement
Many of the images in the project's first "gallery show" are familiar ones
to fans of the kinds of stickers, wheat-paste posters, freehand graffiti and
stenciled paintings known as street art, which appear on walls, mailboxes
and bus stops in cities around the world. Some practitioners, like Shepard
Fairey, a Los Angeles artist considered one of the fathers of sticker art,
have significant followings and have been able to land gallery shows and
lucrative design and marketing work for clothing and record companies.
But other street artists make little money, so the founders of the cellphone
project say they hope thousands of their fans around the world will be
willing to pay their carriers $1.99 per image to have their work as
"wallpaper" on their phones' tiny screens.
"How much of a revenue stream it will be depends on a lot of factors," said
Marc Schiller, who founded the Web site and the cellphone gallery with his
wife, Sara. "But the goal is really to try to find a way to help artists do
what they do for a living."
The artists will receive 11 percent of the money made when their images are
downloaded, Mr. Schiller said. An additional 12 percent will go to Keep a
Child Alive, a charity that provides medicine in Africa and elsewhere to
children and adults who are H.I.V. positive or have AIDS. The rest of the
money goes to overhead, Mr. Schiller said, adding that he and his wife make
no money from the project.
The project appears to be one of the first of its kind. Nokia, the cellphone
company, began a similar program last year that offers users of its phones
free downloads of images from a handful of emerging artists and contemporary
stars like William Wegman, Nam June Paik and Louise Bourgeois.
Mr. Schiller, who acknowledged in an interview that he had never downloaded
an image onto his cellphone, said that since the project began on March 14,
several hundred people a day from various countries had downloaded the
images. (In the United States, images are currently available on the ATT,
Cingular and T-Mobile wireless services. They can also be downloaded through
most carriers around the world.) But he said he thought that the project,
which has no advertising or publicity campaign, would probably increase in
popularity as word spreads among street-art devotees, many of whom comb city
streets looking for and photographing examples of their favorite artists'
work.
Mr. Schiller said he was concerned that some of the artists involved might
feel their work would lose much of its power if it was digitized and
translated to a tiny screen. But he said he also considered the project an
outgrowth of the traditions of street art, which has always been shown,
shared and appreciated in unorthodox ways.
At least one artist involved, Patrick McNeil, a member of the New York
street-art collective Faile, said he also saw cellphones, particularly as
they include more sophisticated video screens, as a new frontier in art.
"I think it's just the nature of the way things are going," said Mr. McNeil,
whose three-member collective has designed album covers and performs
consulting work for a tennis shoe company. "Most people involved in this
type of urban art and media already have Web sites, so it's not really all
that different."
But Mr. McNeil did say that knowing what he knows about most things
involving profits in the art world, he did not plan to start counting his
money from the cellphone project just yet. "At the end of the day," he said,
"I don't know why people would buy or download an image when you can just go
out and photograph it on the street. I definitely don't have any
expectations about income from this. I guess I just think about it as a fun
little experiment."
"I know we do have a following," he added. "But I'm not too sure about this.
Maybe in Japan it's going to be a big thing."
–
Lee Wells
Brooklyn, NY 11222
http://www.leewells.org
917 723 2524
Coming to a Phone Near You: Street Art - NYTIMES
-
Type: discussion