The Art of Permission
Peter Vallone. This is Cope2. What is your fucking problem, bro? We are painting subway trains that you are not paying for motherfucker? Just because you have money doesn't give you the right to do what you think the fuck you want just for elections, just to get elected?This is Cope2 motherfucker? from the Bronx. Bring the cops, I don't give a fuck? You ain't no fucking body on this planet Earth?We're trying to do something honest, and you out to be putting your nose in your fucking ass and shit? We're graffiti artists, we're trying to make it in this world? That's it? You don't live forever so do what you want motherfucker. All right?
The message from famed tagger Cope2, nee Fernando Carlo, was a feather in the cap of Vallone, son of the former Council speaker. By day's end he'd held a press conference and played the message to the assembled hacks, myself among them. The police were sent out to pick up Cope2, who has 10 previous arrests for harassment and one for assault, for questioning.
Also last week, clothing designer and former spray-paint vandal Mark Ecko took the city to federal court after Mayor Bloomberg revoked-"at my request," according to Vallone, who's rumored to have his eye on a district attorney run-the permit the city had already issued to hold what Ecko's called "a tribute to art" in Chelsea on Wednesday, the day this paper hits the streets.
"If these people want to put up a canvas, and paint on it, that's fine," said Bloomberg on his radio show Friday. "But there's no reason why they have a subway car to paint on. That's not a piece of canvas. That's encouraging something. It's trying to bring us back to a period in this city that's where, I don't think anybody wants to go back to," he said, uninterrupted by host John Gambling. "We've come a long way. We're going in the right direction. We got to keep making progress here. Enough. We're not going to give them a permit."
The event was to have featured 20 famous writers and vandals, Cope2 among them, who burned their way to immortality in the 70s and 80s, and into careers as recognized artists since. Several of the art stars are also featured-what are the odds?-in Atari's eagerly anticipated new graffiti-themed video game, "Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure." Art tribute, indeed.
Ecko has spent $190,000 on the event, which had also been approved by Chelsea's Community Board 4, mostly on artist's fees and on making and shipping ten 48-foot-long by 8-foot-high replicas of New York's old bluebird subway cars for the artists to use as canvases. This would be the first opportunity to paint a train car head to toe since the Koch administration.
In an effort to prove his good intentions in putting on the event, Ecko hired a security guard for each artist and commissioned barricades to be placed around each train. "This is a pop culture moment, not a criminal activity," Ecko said.
He and other graf writers say the same thing about the video game based on their exploits, which stands to make them all some significant money. The price for Cope2's participation in the Atari game was "a little over $20,000," he told me. "Graffiti has two kinds: They have artists, and they have vandals. I do both."
On Monday, Ecko, who was represented by Ron Kuby's law firm, emerged victorious in his court case, so barring a last minute repeal and order to desist, the train bombing (it seems such an anachronistic phrase now) is back on.
My scorecard has all sides winning: The graffiti vandals won in federal court, while the mayor, often derided as an out-of-touch billionaire, and his ally Vallone managed to shore up their political support among conservative Democrats even as they fought to short-circuit the First Amendment.
And while Ecko's event has come off looking a lot more like a corporation promotion than an old-school celebration of one of the four elements of hiphop culture, sales of the game, we assume, will only benefit from the attention.
Vallone, a former prosecutor with a curl in his upper lip, had already butted heads with Cope2 earlier this year, when Time magazine paid the graffiti writer $20,000 to spray paint a Manhattan billboard. The councilman wrote an OpEd in The Daily News accusing the magazine of supporting a vandal and "punk whose [sic] been defacing our city." There was little he could do, though, to stop a private company.
Vallone's fight with Time was just the latest in a series of such Kabuki plays, in which censors shopping for conservative votes take on corporations shopping for underground or at least street cred.
Mayor Giuliani learned how and how much to censor in 1999 when he tried to cut off nearly $7 million of funding to the Brooklyn Museum for exhibiting "Sensation," an exhibit that included a painting of a black Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung, along with other attention-hungry avant-garde cliches.
That the exhibit was in essence an unethical collaboration between the museum and Charles Saatchi, the British adman become art collector known for courting (and profiting from) just such censors, went unnoticed as the mayor's censorious ravings shored up his flagging conservative support, while the exhibit received vast coverage and was a huge success; everyone played their assigned roles and everyone profited.
Bloomberg signaled he'd be more open to the art community. Even before he gave the green light for The Gates, which wrapped Central Park in saffron fabric, he essentially did away with the decency commission his predecessor had set up after the Brooklyn Museum affair by replacing the board members with his own, art-friendly appointees.
But graffiti is proving to be Bloomberg's shit-smeared virgin-an exploitive symbol masquerading as art that gives the mayor license to suspend free-speech protections and profit politically for it, even as the group producing the art is guaranteed publicity and income.
This time around, it seems everyone knows the fix is in, and no one much cares. In the days leading up to Rakoff's decision, only the NYCLU piped up in support of Ecko and the First Amendment. The expected ritual outrage was almost entirely absent.
Vallone stance has been that you can only win votes by taking a tough stance against graffiti. He's right. The editorial pages have been dead quiet on this. There was at least mild outrage when the Great Lawn was limited to six major events a year. At least the perennial protesters and expected writers and papers bothered to protest the move to block protests.
This indifference makes sense. Are graffiti writers really going to coalesce into a movement to take back the trains? Who really is going to fight for the right to graffiti a fake train, or get excited about choosing sides in a fight between posturing politicians and a culture vulture like Ecko?
As chair of the Council's Public Safety Committee, Vallone has steered money to groups that commissioned Lady Pink, whose work graces this week's cover and who is also part of Ecko's group (her husband, also a graffiti artist, is a character in the video game), to do legal murals throughout his district.
Still, Vallone has backed Bloomberg's play to the hilt-even while conceding the city was overstepping its bounds in rescinding the permit, he reaffirmed his support for this overstep:
"Whenever a government acts regarding the content of a message, very serious concerns are raised. And the city may not be ultimately successful in the courts. But I think the city is doing a great thing," he said before the ruling.
Federal Judge Jed Rakoff simply laughed out of court concerns that art will inspire crime.
"By the same token, presumably, a street performance of Hamlet would be tantamount to encouraging revenge murder," Judge Rakoff wrote in a pithy, nine-page decision that reads rather like a legal brief from Ecko's lawyers. "As for a street performance of Oedipus Rex, don't even think about," Rakoff added.
"When you do it with permission," Vallone conceded when we spoke before the decision was issued, "whether or not it is art is in the eye of the beholder."
Lady Pink, disgusted at Vallone's attack on Ecko, said of the murals she painted in his district: "They could just fall off the wall."
Or as Ecko has it: "One man's art is another man's trash."
This is Cope2. I'm trying to reach Peter Vallone. Um, please get back to me at 347-###-####. I would just like to apologize if you felt I disrespected you in any way. And please get back to me as soon as possible? I never threatened you. I cursed you out? I apologize.