Buying into street art

This semester I had to drop about $100 per class for my textbooks. That’s $600 I could have used for a number of things: designer drugs, food, companionship or exotic pets.

How am I supposed to ball if I’m flat broke?

People keep telling me that this is normal. College students are supposed to scrape by month-to-month eating Ramen noodles and snail through the internet on DSL.

Well, I’m not about to download music on anything less than a 50 Mb/s connection. I don’t have time to wait; I’m a busy man doing important busy man things. As a result of my aversion to frugal living, I have decided to become rich. In order to accomplish my goal, I am going to become a street artist.

Recently, I watched Banksy’s documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” If I understood its message correctly, Thierry “Mr. Brainwash” Guetta discovered the formula for marketable street art.

Mr. Brainwash realized that sometimes art has nothing to do with actual skill as much as it has to do with being great at making meta-jokes on society through brand images and pop culture.

I have been inspired by MBW’s opening exhibit named “Life is Beautiful.”

My exhibit will be called “Life is Bro,” and it will contain thousands of copies of a bird that was drawn using designer drugs. The bird has a curious look on his face as it cocks its head to the side and says “Come at me, Bro.”

The pigeon represents the high-flying nature of college life, and the subtext expresses the confrontational nature of man.

Each bird will have the same head but different clothes on. Some Nautica, North Face, Ralph Lauren Polo or what have you. This adds the essential element of some sort of brand image. People will be drawn to the idea of what the brand means to society as a whole when it’s being worn by an idiot pigeon.

The greatest part of this idea is that it will cost me next to nothing to produce. I draw the bird once, hire a team of otherwise unemployed telecommunication majors that can Photoshop the bird into different clothes and then print a hundred thousand copies in various sizes and colors on my grandma’s printer.

Voilà, now there is art to be distributed.

Next, the team I will hire pastes them across the campus in various places that might or might not have significance; I suppose that depends on how one interprets it.

Once the image becomes popular enough, I can get rich selling T-shirts with the pigeon’s face on it.

Make me rich, damn it.


E-mail: nicjacob@indiana.edu