Brilliantly EXECUTED!
On the whole, Berlin is lighter on the advertising than London. For one thing, there seem to be more small businesses here - and fewer big-name chains - so I'm assuming that the advertising budget is smaller. There are certainly fewer posters on tube trains and in the underground stations. But when building facades are being overhauled, they tend to throw up multi-story scaffolding which is protected with vast, rippling silver sheets (which make one hell of a racket when it's windy) and, from time to time, companies take advantage by covering that with a vast ad.
Graffiti is another way in which the two cities differ. London never really found its feet in terms of graffiti. Kids scribble things on bus-stops using permanent markers. Shops and phone-boxes and other items of street furniture get tagged. Trains and train-tracks attract more ambitious designs - but nothing very classy. And that's it. In Berlin, every street, every building, every door-way gets scrawled over. The kids also seem to compete to hit the most difficult spots: rooftops, the sides of buildings, all of those little bare interstices that ordinarily pass unnoticed six and seven floors above the street. Sometimes, it looks like the only way to reach these spots is by abseiling from the gutter, or hanging out of a window. Around here, the SW Crew seem to have a monopoly on daredevil graffiti.
Anyway, this morning, these two differences combined in a really neat way. I'd been out shopping for pancake ingredients yesterday when I saw that Tally Weijl had put up a giant ad at the end of Danziger. It was a typically naff photo of a girl and a giant pink rabbit. Today, as I walked towards the poster, I noticed that both the girl and the rabbit had what appeared to be bullet-holes in their foreheads. And ... they did. Overnight, some crew had either scaled the scaffolding and cut holes in it from the back or had - somehow - lowered themselves down from the roof above in order to deface the ad:
Arguably, I suppose this is simple vandalism rather than graffiti, but whatever: I much prefer it to the polished street art that "good" graffiti has become. The whole graffiti-as-art thing is fine, of itself, but because the style has been so thoroughly subsumed into contemporary corporate design, it seems to have been robbed of any power it might once have had. The slewing of the Tally Weijl poster is much smarter.
Graffiti is another way in which the two cities differ. London never really found its feet in terms of graffiti. Kids scribble things on bus-stops using permanent markers. Shops and phone-boxes and other items of street furniture get tagged. Trains and train-tracks attract more ambitious designs - but nothing very classy. And that's it. In Berlin, every street, every building, every door-way gets scrawled over. The kids also seem to compete to hit the most difficult spots: rooftops, the sides of buildings, all of those little bare interstices that ordinarily pass unnoticed six and seven floors above the street. Sometimes, it looks like the only way to reach these spots is by abseiling from the gutter, or hanging out of a window. Around here, the SW Crew seem to have a monopoly on daredevil graffiti.
Anyway, this morning, these two differences combined in a really neat way. I'd been out shopping for pancake ingredients yesterday when I saw that Tally Weijl had put up a giant ad at the end of Danziger. It was a typically naff photo of a girl and a giant pink rabbit. Today, as I walked towards the poster, I noticed that both the girl and the rabbit had what appeared to be bullet-holes in their foreheads. And ... they did. Overnight, some crew had either scaled the scaffolding and cut holes in it from the back or had - somehow - lowered themselves down from the roof above in order to deface the ad:
Arguably, I suppose this is simple vandalism rather than graffiti, but whatever: I much prefer it to the polished street art that "good" graffiti has become. The whole graffiti-as-art thing is fine, of itself, but because the style has been so thoroughly subsumed into contemporary corporate design, it seems to have been robbed of any power it might once have had. The slewing of the Tally Weijl poster is much smarter.