Charlie Todd and Abe Lincoln, Jr. Photo by Luna Park.
Messing with out-of-home advertising (which, in a nutshell, is what we do here) takes many forms, but it is rooted in the art of détournement, today more commonly referred to as subvertising. That is the practice of subverting existing advertising by tweaking its message, appropriating the symbols of advertising to twist and critique it.
However, we actually don’t install a lot of détournement. Generally, if we are subverting anything, it’s subverting advertising infrastructure rather than the ads themselves, because we just take them down and replace them with artwork that is (usually) completely unrelated. And we like it that way. We just see these pay phones as venues for public art.
This week, we went back to our field’s roots with a very subtle subvertisement, courtesy of Charlie Todd and Abe Lincoln, Jr. Charlie and Abe’s piece is a near-match to existing ads for New York Powerball lottery, which appear in pay phones throughout the city. Look closely though, and their message is a bit different.
Charlie explains:
Outdoor advertising is a blight on our city streets. The decaying phone booth has long been the most egregious example of this visual pollution. These almost always out-of-order structures offer no benefit to our streets and exist only to display advertising. For Art in Ad Places, I chose to replace a Powerball advertisement both because the lottery is a regressive tax on the poor, and because I thought it would be fun to mess with the digital display. As the Powerball jackpot grows over time, the number will get closer and closer to displaying the actual odds of winning: 1 in 292 million. I'm happy to see that the pay phones are finally starting to come down in the city, though I'm not sure the LinkNYC replacements, with their even brighter ads and their sketchy surveillance technology, will be much better.
Yes, that’s right: the Loserball poster not only turns the iconic Powerball ad on its head, it actually incorporates the real, (somehow still functioning) LED signage that the real ads use to display up-to-date jackpot numbers!
So, a special thank you to Charlie and Abe for not only bringing Art in Ad Places back to its historical roots but also for pushing us out of our comfort zone to install a (relatively) high tech piece of art.