"Art" heist

Published Feb 10 2007, 05:46 PM by Adam Reilly

I'm as sick of all things Mooninite as anybody. That said.... For the love of God, could somebody at the Globe please issue a directive ordering that the bombs-that-were-really-billboards not be described as "art"?!?

Michael Levenson gets it right in today's write-up of the resignation of Jim Samples, formerly GM of the Cartoon Network. The Mooninites were a "marketing campaign that sparked a bomb scare."

Also on the front page, however, John Ellement and Stephanie Ebbert get it exactly wrong. Discussing the graffiti-artist conclave going down in Boston this weekend, they write: "It was the second time in less than two weeks that authorities had grappled with an underground artistic event. [Emph. added] On Jan. 31, battery-charged light boards promoting a television cartoon set off a bomb scare that confounded authorities and snarled traffic for hour."

AAAAAARGH!

Seriously--why is this so difficult? Billboards "promoting a television cartoon" aren't art, undergound or otherwise. Repeating this canard gives Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens more credit than they deserve while simultaneously giving artists a bad name. So please, cut it out. And read Greg Cook's treatment of the subject in this week's Phoenix while you're at it.