Art-vertising?

It seems that advertising agencies are having a harder and harder time getting their clients noticed... At least according to an article in the New York Times, recently. Above is a photo of Right Guard's campaign in the subways of London... arm pit TV. Sort of performance art, in a way. Sort of.

Below is Chevrolet's billboard campaign where they used British pennies to cover a photo of a car.... but passers by couldn't resist picking at it, and the billboard didn't last more than 30 minutes! (I especially like the mum teaching her kids how to steal the pennies!)

Perhaps this is all just the "shout-louder-so-the-media-overwhelmed-people-will-hear" Shock n' Awe movement. That's my guess, at any rate.

Look, for instance, at the YouTube video of a glass elevator in Manhattan that was done up to look like a giant Oreo dunking into a glass of milk. It turns out that the whole event was simply devised to get a huge viewership on YouTube (which I am apparently helping, I guess - phft!).

What does this have to do with art, you might ask? Well, probably not much, except there is a degree of creativity in these campaigns that I feel is... well... brilliant.

And then there was this artist, Stan Herd, who was hired by an ad agency to make a giant pizza for Papa John's. It will be made of alfalfa bales (the crust, I think), red mulch (pepperoni), limestone (onions), cornstalks (green peppers), black mulch (olives). The pizza is meant to be seen by passengers landing at the Denver Airport, just in time for the National Democratic Convention. This same artist had been hired in the past to a make "crop art" advertising vodka.

So... yeah... um... art. I guess... sort of. What do you think?

(Note: New biobangles will be showcased next post.)