Words by Patricia Milder: Across the street from my apartment on Avenue C there used to be, until about a month ago, a mural painted in memorial of a little girl from the neighborhood. People would leave flowers under the portrait and light tall glass encased candles decorated with images of the Virgin Mary. The wall has since been painted over. Today it boasts a cartoonish image of a RCN truck and advertises local installment for high speed broadband internet, video on demand, digital cable TV and phone service. The marriage between art space and commercial interest is nothing new, but the placing and tactics are getting progressively more ugly. Last year, Sony’s guerrilla marketing campaign that included spray-painted images, minus the brand logo, on walls in New York, San Francisco and L.A. earned much attention – Sony sold millions of the new PSP consoles and also made a lot of people angry.

It makes sense, after all, for advertisers to use the homegrown spaces and stylized images that their target demographic responds to. But with ads leaking off of billboards into murals comes a shift in our collective experience. Walls are the city’s skin - decorated with tattoos, scars, beautified, worn out, and reconstructed. The very human desire to decorate our own bodies is extended here, in patterns as eclectic as the people who inhabit the spaces inside. We exercise restraint when viewing others’ personal choices of physical adornment. You don’t just stop being friends with someone because of their gansta stamp. But removing all judgment and accepting the corporations as we would our neighbors is like stealing condoms from Kari Smith, the girl from Utah who took ten grand to ink (as in permanently) her forehead with “GoldenPalace.com.” They might procreate, but do you want to be associated? These public spaces, which we view as regularly and immediately as a bathroom mirror, speak volumes. We don’t need to have logos covering every inch of our natural bodies to see ourselves as bought and sold.

Media theorists like McLuhan are obsessed with the discussion of how human patterns change in response to the bigger, faster, deeper ways in which technology extends and magnifies our senses. Even though painting on crumbling brick walls hardly falls under the category of new media, the way we see has been so transformed over the last decade that even these traditionally lasting, static spaces nonchalantly parade images through a revolving door. On Ludlow St., near Houston, a promotional mural for New York photographer Kareem Black was just replaced by an ad for the Ford Fusion, complete with big block graffiti style letters and exciting car-driving-out-of-wall graphic. The layers of paint at that particular site tell a history of the block much richer than one I can recall, yet at the moment it just says purchase something. If art, as the painter Ben Shahn claims, starts first with an idea and then manifests itself into appropriate form and shape, imagine the magnitude of an idea appropriate for a mural. Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros…and Ford? -- el fin.