Until the pranks turned ugly, it was heartening to follow the dust-up between a bunch of street artists and their nemesis or nemeses, identity unknown. As the New York Times reported this week, for some time works of stenciled graffiti art and wheat-pasted posters slapped onto walls in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan have been splashed with paint and scrawled with messages of protest.
Anonymous claimants have distributed various communiques taking responsibility for the sabotage, citing the Situationists of the 1950s and 1960s as inspiration. One manifesto declared street art "a bourgeois-sponsored rebellion," politically impotent, facilitating gentrification.
It was, if nothing else, good to hear that art was still being contested in the streets, not just marketed and sold in Chelsea. But then, earlier this month, as the summer silly season started, somebody lobbed a stink bomb into the opening of a show by Faile, a Brooklyn street art collective, on the Lower East Side. Everybody was forced to leave after fire engines arrived.
On June 21 at Shepard Fairey's opening in Dumbo, Brooklyn, a tall, 24-year-old Harry Potter look-alike named James Cooper was arrested after witnesses said he, along with another man, who got away, tried to light a similar bomb in a metal coffee canister. The police charged Cooper with reckless endangerment, criminal possession of a weapon, harassment and other crimes. He has denied the charges.
Guy Debord, the Situationist writer and spokesman who, before he died in 1994, couldn't resist responding to anybody who barely mentioned him, would no doubt be exercised by this latest invocation of his legacy.
A Situationist in Paris did once dress up as a Dominican priest and read an anti-theist tract to a baffled congregation at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
In Copenhagen, in the 1960s, members of a group calling itself the Movement for a Scandinavian Bauhaus Situationniste were suspected by the police of being responsible for the decapitation of The Little Mermaid, the city's famous symbol, and absconding with the head.
Still, Situationist pranks were pointedly political. Across nearly half a century of random art world mischief, they seem almost scientific in their focus, by comparison with young people who toss stink bombs at gallery openings or splash paint on street art.
The current agitators, although they've got some of the revolutionary patter down, seem to lack clearly defined targets or priorities. Is the problem gentrification or the art market or artists or late capitalism? What's troubling them - the street art they're defacing or the fact that some of the street artists might also show in galleries?
And, by the way, what's wrong with artists, even street artists, making a buck? The spectacle, as Debord might have said, of the present art world in thrall to Mammon is incredibly depressing.
But selling art isn't selling out, necessarily, and making art for people on the street doesn't preclude showing (a different sort of) art in galleries. Physical endangerment in the form of bombs, stinky or otherwise, then crosses the line from mischief to mayhem.
I suspect the agitators have read history books about the 1980s, which for Cooper's generation must seem like the Dark Ages. The art market back then scooped up graffiti artists, a co-optation entailing, as the Princeton art historian Hal Foster has said, an element of racial appropriation.
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