29.6.05

Two-faced Tats Cru?

This post completes my triology of calling out street artists. It's more of a follow-up to the Tats Cru / Hummer post.

As you can plainly see here, here and here, Tats Cru are in fact paid by Hummer. They get paid to paint the message, then deface it. I'm almost jealous. Isn't the consumer supposed to be involved in the communication at some point, folks? Are Hummer and Tats Cru just wanking each other here?

Just because you're "street" doesn't mean you're immune to ethics. Wait... Let me rephrase that: just because you're a corporate graffiti artist doesn't mean you're "street".

2 comments:

E said...

I'm a bit confused. I know that Tats Cru painted these Hummer ads, and included a "signature" on the bottom of both, but are they they ones who are actually defacing the ads?

Maybe I'm misreading your previous post, but it seems as if you're calling them out for adding their "signature" ("they re-branded it with their own branding"), no? From the new pics that you've posted it seems like the signature "tag" was there all along and the defacement came later.

Is this not the case?

PYLB said...

In the first post, as I understood it, Tats Cru was taking credit for defacing the ad. In the most recent post, it is revealed that they created the ads to begin with.

Not being in NYC, where this is happening, I can't say for sure. All I know is, around that first image there was all kinds of credit given to Tats Cru for "jamming" a Hummer ad (I think it was on AdRants, maybe Wooster.. can't remember where I first saw it, but the photo is on Flickr). In hindsight, that information may have been totally bunk. The person who snapped the pic may have incorrectly extrapolated whom was to blame for the tag. Honestly, I'm a little fuzzy too on what really happened in that first pic... now that I located the others.

Whether it was Tats Cru or not is its own issue. That the tag itself is toxic paint, employed to spread an environmentally-friendly message, is still something I have a problem with -- no matter who did it.