The Drone That Will Change Graffiti
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
[Katsu] pioneered the fire extinguisher spray can, which has permitted him to expand the scale of his art by orders of magnitude. He famously demoed it at "Art in the Streets," a 2012 show at the the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, when, without invitation, he left his multi-story calling card on the side of the museum.
The part of the story that is not mentioned is that this show was very well-attended (it's graffiti! it's art! it's hip!), but very controversial in an LA art world that is quite accepting of out-of-the-box concepts. This show and shows like it precipitated the resignation of all the artists on the MOCA board, and then caused the departure of the museum director, Jeffrey Deitch, who had championed the show.
The reason this is worth mentioning is that the article is playing in to the same rather thoughtlessly "transgressive" narrative about graffiti being, in itself, a serious contribution to the art world. What we actually have here is an interesting tech demo of novel ways to apply spray paint. But, what is the artistic contribution of this work? What is this cultural intervention on the part of Katsu trying to accomplish? (Or put another way, "Why are you calling this art? What cultural effect do you want to achieve?")
All he talks about in the interview is (a) some rather tired reasoning about the paint effects offered by the new method of application, and (b) some uninteresting claims about reclaiming the drone in the name of artistic expression.
This is hip and meme-abundant, but I don't see how it seriously contributes to culture.
"why didn't he respect our space, our praise, our attention, our money? why didn't he respect that he was being given something 'bigger' and 'better' and 'more' than his petty world of crime?" because fuck you. graffiti is fuck you. still. regardless of recent attempts to embrace it, recognize it, retain it, reform it from the art and corporate worlds. it's attractive and interesting and 'hip' to these people, but they struggle with it.
i remember reading a graf mag sometime in the 90s, and a rather amazing and accomplished artist said something to the effect of "i think what's most important is damage. everyone can do damage, regardless of skill." i throughly rejected this as a young kid looking for an artistic outlet, but many years later, after becoming a part of the corporate world learning more about art and business and society and money, i think he had something. i think maybe that is what's important. it's not art that everyone can call art, even some people that are trying really hard.
I'd assume the audience of Silicon Valley Contemporary were savvy enough to see through galleries thin attempts to pander to them with stuff like this and "We accept bitcoin!" signs. I think SV is being looked at as a bit of a sitting duck due to the combo of huge amounts of money + generally small frame of reference when it comes to modern & contemporary art amongst its inhabitants (I think that's fair to say). It's the sort of situation art advisors dream about.
Seriously I think a wonderful investment right now might be to buy 1,000 Phantom's and just put them in a warehouse so that when they are banned you can resell them for 10x the markup. I am still waiting for the taser drone.
In an unrelated note, in the 1984 movie Runaway [1] the protagonist uses a quadcopter equivalent to go in and scout a 'hostile' robot situation. I could easily see this sort of deployment by police becoming common. If it stops them from coming in guns blazing it will be a good thing.
For example construction. Right now there is a lot of heavy machinery at a construction site and humans to operate them, in future significant part of that could be replaced with drones. While it vastly more expensive to develop a drone compared to training a human and building machinery, drones have nearly infinite scaling[0].
Construction drones could also help address extraordinarily high development costs (California I am looking at you).
[0] If you make one drone work, getting a million drones is relatively easy, compared to training a million humans if you trained one.
I detest vandalism.
Perhaps this drone could instead be used to repair vandalism in hard to reach areas. Matching paint colors would be difficult, though I think merely covering up the graffiti with a slightly-off color would be an improvement in most cases.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-graffiti-drone-an-inter...