Billboard | Broken City Lab

By Justin on November 28th, 2009, 12:37 am 0 Comments

Beautiful City is a new campaign based out of Toronto that is trying to persuade the city to create a tax for billboards that would do the following:

A historical 53% increase to the annual municipal funding available to all artists, festivals and arts institutions,

Close to $100 000.00 dollars for public realm improvement for each Toronto ward, every year – for projects such as greening,

Almost a 1/3 of a million dollars for each of the 13 priority neighbourhoods to fund accessible youth arts programming, and

Hiring 17 dedicated officers to enforce the new billboard bylaw.

The premise of the campaign is that billboard advertising, unlike all other forms of advertising, provides no content to the public in exchange for taking up public space (editorial to advertising ratios for TV is 75/25, for print is usually 50/50 but for billboards is 0 to 100).

Sounds like a fairly genius idea. What other ways could we think of generating new revenue for arts organizations in the city, given the likely continuing or eventual decline of funding for the arts in the city?

[via View on Canadian Art / image of Three Billboards About Love by Peter Fuss]

Tagged: billboard city context funding Toronto

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Billboard Text

By Justin on August 9th, 2009, 9:11 am 1 Comments

Oh, how I cannot wait for the day that we have some money to do something as big as this.

[via Heather is Watching]

Tagged: billboard context text

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Art Replaces over 120 Illegal Billboards in New York City

By Justin on May 1st, 2009, 7:40 am 0 Comments

Late last week, over 120 illegal billboards were taken over by Jordan Seiler’s incrediblely ambitious “New York Street Advertising Takeover.”

Organized as a reaction to the hundreds of billboards that are not registered with the city, and therefore are illegal (and yet not prosecuted by New York city), the NYSAT whitewashed and then over 80 artists went and repainted the spaces. Above is just one of the many treatments artists gave the former advertising space.

Conversation about looking into getting a small portion of the huge number of billboards going up in Windsor for artists was brought up at last night’s Artcite. Oh, the things we could do with billboard space.

[via Wooster Collective]

Tagged: advertising billboard context illegal New York paint

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