“No copyright, no authorship”

Interesting story in this week’s New York Magazine concerning an outlaw artist. Seems that this artist, Poster Boy (aka vandal under NY law), appropriates and reconfigures subway advertising posters to make political statements. According to the Magazine, Poster Boy dropped out of a “reputable art school” as well as recovering from the current ongoing disease of “making things for bored rich people to hang above their couch.” Seems this rebirth was partially sparked by his introduction to Noam Chomsky, Lao Tzu, and George Orwell. “Books like Animal Farm and 1984 sparked something,” he says. “A new sense of independence, where I felt, I should take control of my environment.”

In January of this year, after dropping out of a reputable art school, he began loitering around the cavernous subway stations that link his Bushwick apartment to his Chelsea-art-studio day job. “I was playing with the posters, cutting them up, ’cause I have to use razors a lot at my job,” he says. His earliest works were hastily assembled, full of floating heads and juxtaposed slogans. But by the spring he was incorporating social critiques, rearranging the Iron Man logo into IRAN=NAM, and altering an NYPD recruitment-drive poster to read MY NYPD KILLED SEAN BELL.

Read the entire New York article here.