I once suggested that Fred Radtke, the “Gray Ghost” anti-graffiti zealot of New Orleans, is in fact the city’s most successful graffiti artist: His blobby tag is all over town, inescapable.
More recently, by way of this post on Urban Prankster, I’ve just very belatedly watched a 16-minute video from 2002 called “The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal,” which considers the aesthetics of graffiti removal. It’s definitely worth checking out:
I don’t know how serious they are — the real point seems to be to rag on graf-removal efforts in Portland — but it’s pretty well done. And in any case, I’m completely serious: I do think Radtke is a kind of involuntary street artist, and while I understand the views of people who think he’ s a “tumor,” I also think his “work” is weirdly fascinating. As I’ve mentioned before, we suspect that the cover of Letters From New Orleans features a Radtke:
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