Bubbalicious for grown-ups

The Guardian Online reported Sunday about a NYC adman-cum-artist whose “bubbalicious” ad critique campaign is giving some of the power of ads back to the people. Catharine Rapley reports:

Four years ago, Ji Lee, a then 31-year-old art director for advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi in New York, was heading down a career black hole. ‘I was tired of the work I was producing, which was often boring and offensive to the public’s intelligence,’ he tells me from Manhattan. ‘Any ideas I thought were engaging for the consumer never went anywhere because they were considered risky. It was frustrating.’ But instead of quitting, he decided to hit the streets and secretly subvert the very adverts he’d been creating during the day. He was also angry at the way advertisements now saturate every inch of public space – shouting one message after another.

What Lee did is put blank speech bubbles on ads in public space, and let sidewalk-strollers have their say. You can see excellent documentation of the project here.

A bit closer to home — but just barely — the Toronto Star reports on a recent conference in Victoria on art and political change. The article focuses more on theory than action, though it does relate that in artist Norman Nawrocki‘s Montreal ‘hood, a group recently tore up a laneway to plant a garden. The purpose? To slow down rampant speeding through that area.