Reproduction allows for the widespread sharing of treasures without endangering them.
By LEE LAWRENCE for the WSJ
July 5, 2016 5:18 p.m. ET
7 COMMENTS
Los Angeles

Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road
The Getty
Through Sept. 4

On a sunny afternoon, the glare in the Getty Center’s Arrival Plaza is blinding—and stepping into Cave 285 feels like teleporting to heaven. Here, in one of the main features of “Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road,” winged creatures flutter on the vaulted ceiling while, on the walls, Buddhas preach, myths unfold, mortals repent, donors pay homage. Amid scrolling florals and colored flames, a large Buddha sits, his face a featureless mass of clay. This is a full-size copy, created by hand on the basis of detailed scans and myriad photographs of a grotto carved into cliffs that edge the Gobi desert in northwestern China. It is as faithful to the colors, designs and brushstrokes artists used in A.D. 538-39 as it is to the deterioration and damage that nature and man have since wrought.

The fragility of some sites has made copies an increasingly viable way to share treasures more widely without endangering them. The Getty’s exhibition uses them in tandem with more traditional displays to bring out the richness, complexity and conservation challenges of one of the world’s great art treasures. Its curatorial team includes experts from the Getty’s institutes for research and conservation, the Dunhuang Academy and the New York-based Dunhuang Foundation, and while theirs is not the first U.S. show to tackle the subject, it is the most ambitious.

This video from 2011 was fun to watch again. Animated cut-out street art in Turkey!

A few weeks ago, Stencil Archive got secure via Let's Encrypt! and the mad minds at Mission Web Works. This means that the site is now https, with a padlock beside the website name in your browser. Going secure, we had to begin to update all our links, which don't like embedded files from non-secure http sites.

We focused on videos the past few days and they're all updated and ready for some deep watching. Our video links go all the way back to 2007, when Flash ruled and resolution was a bit lower. And there wasn't much content protected by https.

We've gone all the way back to the first video post and attempted to fix all the links. Where video links were broken, replacement videos were posted, other sources of the video were found, or the whole post was deleted. So poke around and you may find some new stencil goodness.

BLEK Le RAT - 30 YEARS LATER from Spencer Keeton Cunningham on Vimeo.

<<<< Environmentalists, like Honduran activist Berta Caceres, are being murdered around the world. Respect to all those who lose their lives fighting to save the natural world they live in.
Photo submission thanks to: Chris C., Alisa, Amanda, Larry Jones, and Raven
Tunes in background from: WRAS
HTTPS (Stencil Archive is secure! thanks to Mission Web Works and Let's Encrypt)

Argentina (just one)
Chile (just one)
Honduras (just one)

Banksy (just one)
>NEW< Strok (Norway)
>NEW< ENX (NYC)
Peat (RIP Prince)

East Bay, North Cali
Los Angeles (Jess Chen and crew)
San Diego (just one, thanks Jeremy)
Florida (just one)
Kentucky (just one)
New Jersey
NYC (just one)

'Broken windows' policing doesn’t bring down felonies, study says

New York's police department believes that enforcing laws against petty crime helps with felony deterrence, but many departments are shifting away from this model.

By Deepti Hajela, Associated Press JUNE 23, 2016
Read the NY OIG report (PDF)

NEW YORK — A data analysis found no link between enforcement of low-level quality-of-life crimes and the felony crime rate, the office charged with overseeing New York City's police department said Wednesday.

The report took pains to make clear it was not commenting on the New York Police Department's overall "broken windows" policing approach, but critics of the policy said the findings were proof that going after low-level crimes as a way of deterring larger ones doesn't work. The NYPD called the report flawed.

The inspector general for the police, which is part of the city's Department of Investigation and independent of the NYPD, looked at data for offenses like public urination and public drinking from 2010 to 2015, as well as felony arrest data. In that period, the number of summonses and misdemeanor arrests issued for those acts decreased, but there was no increase in felony crime.

Graffiti artist banned from 20% of US after Reddit users' investigation

Casey Nocket banned from all US national parks and sentenced to 200 hours of community service after users on Reddit tracked her down through social media

The Guardian UK
Tuesday 21 June 2016 18.03 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 22 June 2016 17.00 EDT

A graffiti artist has been banned from all national parks and other federally administered land – that’s more than 20% of the US – for vandalism after Reddit users tracked her down on social media.

Casey Nocket was also sentenced to 200 hours of community service and a fine for drawing faces in acrylic paint in at least six national parks: Death Valley, Colorado National Monument, Canyonlands, Zion and Crater Lake.

Under each picture she left her tag “Creepytings”, which was also the name of her Tumblr blog and Instagram account.

After Nocket wrote in an Instagram post that she had used acrylic paint – which is very difficult to clean off – another user questioned her about it and she responded: “I know, I’m a bad person.”

Nocket’s devil-may-care attitude came back to haunt her, however, when outraged Reddit users tracked her down and reported her to the National Parks Service.

Nocket, a New York-based graffiti artist, first came to the attention of Reddit’s climbing and hiking community when a backpacker posted a picture of one of her works that they had found on a trail in Yosemite. Users quickly began talking about the “National Park Vandal”.

For almost 20 years, I have wandered down the Mission District's Clarion Alley (Clarion Alley Mural Project's (CAMP) new website), snapping photos of any stencils that I haven't snapped already. Back in the 1990s, Scott Williams's amazing mural of Californian animals was the main stencil presence in the one-block alley.  Other stencils never really showed up there, and Williams's panel was the defining style in the City. Back then, Clarion Alley didn't have much in the way of art, tags, etc. that surrounded the amazing murals. The pavement wasn't painted either. It was a clean-looking street that happened to have large panels of art. I still walked down all the time, staying on the hunt for new stencils.

As the 2000s began, public art developed into new forms, ideas, styles, and attitudes. This was before Banksy blew up, before the terms "street art" and "Mission School" were used. Murals weren't being documented by digital cameras and put on social media sites for the world to see. Social media wasn't a term, and barely a platform that could support photographs. Before the Internet blew up, CAMP kept painting walls in the Mission, even outside their namesake street. They had been since 1992, and, as the world connected on the Internet, the world began to discover CAMP.

Anthropologist Follows Los Angeles Trail of Century-Old Hobo Graffiti
By John Rogers
AP LINK

Anthropologist Susan Phillips walks along the Los Angeles River while searching for graffiti by hobos in Los Angeles, May 16, 2016. Phillips had spent a career examining the graffiti that covers urban walls, bridges and freeway overpasses. But when she came across a heretofore unrecognizable collection made not of spray paint but substances like grease pencil and apparently left there for a century, she was stunned.

Anthropologist Susan Phillips had spent a career examining the graffiti that covers urban walls, bridges and freeway overpasses.

But when she came across an unrecognizable collection made not of spray paint but substances like grease pencil and apparently left there for a century, she was stunned.

Phillips had uncovered a peculiar, almost extinct form of American hieroglyphics known as hobo graffiti, the treasure trove discovered under a nondescript, 103-year-old bridge spanning the Los Angeles River. At the time, she was researching her book, "Wallbangin': Graffiti and Gangs in LA."

Graffiti Cannot be Copyright Protected, Claims Moschino, Jeremy Scott
(originally posted on The Fashion Law)
 

The latest update in the Rime vs. Jeremy Scott and Moschino graffiti copying case: The creative director and the Italian design house filed to have the Brooklyn-based graffiti artist’s case dismissed, arguing that he does not have standing to bring claims of copyright infringement because the work was an act of vandalism and should not be protected by law.

In a motion for summary judgment filed on Monday, Moschino and Jeremy Scott asked the court to dismiss the case because the artist, whose name is Joseph Tierney, is an "unabashed felon." According to Moschino and Scott, Tierney did not obtain permission from the building owner in Detroit, Michigan before creating his mural, known as "Vandal Eyes." According to their motion, "As a matter of public policy and basic logic, it would make no sense to grant legal protection to work that is created entirely illegally.”

They continued on to note: "Brazen and willful violations of the law cannot, and, indeed, should not result in the award of copyright privileges," they said. [Note: Rime has previously alleged that he was invited to create the mural at issue on a building in Detroit in 2012].

I promise you all, I'll do my best to answer your questions and quench your curiosities. Meanwhile, a teaser of a slide that may just say it all... or be as thing as the paint pigment upon a cinder block wall. - Russell

STREET ART
APR. 23: BANKSY DOES NEW YORK + HOWZE's STENCIL NATION +
Possibly the world's leading expert on sidewalk stencils, street art, and the Artist Known As Banksy, Russell Howze returns to SF from an international tour behind his Manic D Press publication Stencil Nation, to throw up/down a crucial visual lesson on the illegal public art of Banksy. Focusing on the Greatest Hits from his SF blitz some years back, Howze’s obsessed slide-show spills the beans on the local battle between “vandalism” and the Art world, and so sets up Chris Moukarbel’s hour doc on Banksy’s more recent, uh, “residency” in NYC. ALSO: Pussy Riot’s new music video Refugees In, shot at Banksy’s Dismaland site, and funky chunks of our own Mission School art-crimes, including clips of Twist, Margaret Kilgallen, and Bill (Bozo Texino) Daniel, whose signed(!) 847 photozine is again available, a collab with local graf-art periodical Hamburger Eyes.

Other Cinema shows films every Saturday at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia (@ 21st). Showtime 8:30pm, admission* $7.