JR, Photographic Street Artist, Awarded $100,000 Philanthropic Prize

Kids, don't let your mom tell you graffiti doesn't pay.


[United Kingdom, 2008 (or earlier)]

When we caught this today in The New York Times, we felt like we won the $100K. Whenever something like this happens, all of Hip Hop wins. Congratulations, JR. Next time you're in New York City, you got a place to stay.


[Israel, Face to face, 2007]

In the Times article, author Randy Kennedy writes:

[T]he TED conference, the California lecture series named for its roots in technology, entertainment and design, said on Tuesday that it planned to give its annual $100,000 prize for 2011 — awarded in the past to figures like Bill Clinton, Bono and the biologist E. O. Wilson — to the Parisian street artist known as J R, a shadowy figure who has made a name for himself by plastering colossal photographs in downtrodden neighborhoods around the world. The images usually extol local residents, to whom he has become a Robin Hood-like hero.

[Paris, still there as of August 2010]

And this is what JR's Agency VU writes about his winning the award:

JR, a moving and innovative artist who exhibits freely in the world's streets, has been named the recipient of the 2011 TED Prize – an award granting $100,000 and something much bigger: a wish to change the world with the support of the TED Community's incredible resources.

JR represents a new chapter in the TED Prize. While a seemingly unconventional recipient, his work matches the creativity and innovative spirit of the TED community and his art inspires people to view the world differently – and want to change it for the better.

JR is a true humanitarian who creates "Pervasive Art." Working with a team of volunteers in various urban environments, he mounts enormous black-and-white photo canvases that spread on the buildings of the slums around Paris, on the walls in the Middle East, on the broken bridges in Africa, and in the favelas of Brazil. These images become part of the local landscape and capture people's attention and imagination around the world.

In Rio, he turned hillsides into dramatic visual landscape by applying images to the facades of favela homes. In Kenya, focusing on "Women Are Heroes," he turned Kibera into a stunning gallery of local faces. And in Israel and Palestine, he mounted photos of a rabbi, imam and priest on walls across the region – including the wall separating Israel from the West Bank.

JR remains anonymous – never showing his full face, revealing his name, or explaining his huge portraits – to allow for an encounter between the subject and passers-by.

"JR's mind blowing creations have inspired people to see art where they wouldn't expect it and create it when they didn't know they could," said TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz. "He's putting a human face on some of the most critical social issues while redefining how we view, make and display art. JR has moved all of us at the TED Prize. There is no doubt that his talent – paired with the resources of this amazing community – will lead to a wish that changes the world."

The Music-Copyright Enforcers

Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet... Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble. -- Mark Twain

Remembering Andy Kessler, Original Zoo Yorker (June 11, 1961 – August 10, 2009)

ZOO YORK IS MORE THAN THE TAG IN YOUR DAMN JEANS. SKATEBOARDING IS MORE THAN TONY HAWK VIDEO GAMES AND BAM MARGERA BLOOPER REELS. AND NEW YORK CITY IS LARRY CLARK'S KIDS. R.I.P. HAROLD HUNTER. R.I.P. ANDY KESSLER.


[Andy Kessler, West 30th Street, Manhattan, 2005; photo by Ivory Serra]

Excerpted from "The End of Falling" by Bret Anthony Johnston, published in The New York Times on August 13, 2009.

Born in Greece and raised on West 71st Street in Manhattan, Kessler started skateboarding when he was 11. This was in the 1970s, a time when skateboarding was so alien to New York City that he had to mail-order his gear from California. Significance-wise, think: Prometheus and fire. When other kids saw Kessler carving around the Upper West Side on his board — which would’ve been three inches wide with metal wheels — they followed, and just like that, the East Coast skate scene was born. It was gritty, dirty, and beautiful, the shadow-version of the breezy West Coast surf-style. It still is.



Click here to read more of the Bret Anthony Johnston opinion piece. Click here for Andy's New York Times obituary. Click here for a VERY personal blog post from hip hop mainstay Dante Ross.

Do Protests Matter? Howard Zinn & Others Weigh In

[painting by Jamelah of photo by Dave Gray (Voice1)]

Excerpted from The New York Times, August 20, 2009 (about one month prior to Howard Zinn's death).

Iran’s citizens take to the streets en masse after a disputed election. Gay men in Salt Lake City hold a kissing protest. Members of the Westboro Baptist Church voice their anti-just-about-everything views to military funerals and elsewhere.

Beyond the media attention they inevitably garner, what do protests actually accomplish?

We rounded up a few people who have thought a lot about this topic — Chester Crocker, Bernardine Dohrn, Donna Lieberman, Juan E. Méndez, David S. Meyer, and Howard Zinn — and asked them how much protest matters in this day and age, and why.



Here are their answers.

Paul Krugman: Building A Green Economy

Excerpted from The New York Times, April 5, 2010.

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

But is it possible to make drastic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions without destroying our economy?

Click here to read the rest of the article.

CALL TO ACTION: Root Out Corporate Influence in Washington

Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The 5-to-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.

The ruling represented a sharp doctrinal shift, and it will have major political and practical consequences. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision to reshape the way elections were conducted. Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business.

The decision will be felt most immediately in the coming midterm elections, given that it comes just two days after Democrats lost a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and as popular discontent over government bailouts and corporate bonuses continues to boil.

President Obama called it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

The justices in the majority brushed aside warnings about what might follow from their ruling in favor of a formal but fervent embrace of a broad interpretation of free speech rights.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of the court’s conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

The ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, overruled two precedents: Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, a 1990 decision that upheld restrictions on corporate spending to support or oppose political candidates, and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, a 2003 decision that upheld the part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that restricted campaign spending by corporations and unions.

The 2002 law, usually called McCain-Feingold, banned the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of “electioneering communications” paid for by corporations or labor unions from their general funds in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general elections.

The law, as narrowed by a 2007 Supreme Court decision, applied to communications “susceptible to no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.”

The five opinions in Thursday’s decision ran to more than 180 pages, with Justice John Paul Stevens contributing a passionate 90-page dissent. In sometimes halting fashion, he summarized it for some 20 minutes from the bench on Thursday morning.

Joined by the other three members of the court’s liberal wing, Justice Stevens said the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech the same as that of human beings.

Eight of the justices did agree that Congress can require corporations to disclose their spending and to run disclaimers with their advertisements, at least in the absence of proof of threats or reprisals. “Disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way,” Justice Kennedy wrote. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on this point.

The majority opinion did not disturb bans on direct contributions to candidates, but the two sides disagreed about whether independent expenditures came close to amounting to the same thing.

“The difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind,” Justice Stevens wrote. “And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one’s behalf.”

Justice Kennedy responded that “by definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.”

The case had unlikely origins. It involved a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” a 90-minute stew of caustic political commentary and advocacy journalism. It was produced by Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit corporation, and was released during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2008.

Citizens United lost a suit that year against the Federal Election Commission, and scuttled plans to show the film on a cable video-on-demand service and to broadcast television advertisements for it. But the film was shown in theaters in six cities, and it remains available on DVD and the Internet.

The majority cited a score of decisions recognizing the First Amendment rights of corporations, and Justice Stevens acknowledged that “we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment.”

But Justice Stevens defended the restrictions struck down on Thursday as modest and sensible. Even before the decision, he said, corporations could act through their political action committees or outside the specified time windows.

The McCain-Feingold law contains an exception for broadcast news reports, commentaries and editorials. But that is, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., “simply a matter of legislative grace.”

Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion said that there was no principled way to distinguish between media corporations and other corporations and that the dissent’s theory would allow Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, on television news programs, in books and on blogs.

Justice Stevens responded that people who invest in media corporations know “that media outlets may seek to influence elections.” He added in a footnote that lawmakers might now want to consider requiring corporations to disclose how they intended to spend shareholders’ money or to put such spending to a shareholder vote.

On its central point, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Justice Stevens’s dissent was joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.

When the case was first argued last March, it seemed a curiosity likely to be decided on narrow grounds. The court could have ruled that Citizens United was not the sort of group to which the McCain-Feingold law was meant to apply, or that the law did not mean to address 90-minute documentaries, or that video-on-demand technologies were not regulated by the law. Thursday’s decision rejected those alternatives.

Instead, it addressed the questions it proposed to the parties in June when it set down the case for an unusual second argument in September, those of whether Austin and McConnell should be overruled. The answer, the court ruled Thursday, was yes.

“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

-- Liptak, Adam, "Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit", The New York Times, January 21, 2010



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