The art of graffiti: you either see it or you don't. Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab drags us out of that tired debate and shows us the science of tagging. His Graffiti Taxonomy project has just posted its Paris findings and a transfixing interactive demonstration of the lettering of 180 Parisian taggers. Individual letters were extracted using a process that looks something like this:

Here's a short video about the project:

What are they listening to in Paris? Gareth Murphy at the new and impressive Journal of Music fills us in on the expansive playlists of Parisian radio stations:

Classical, jazz, electro pips and boinks, apocalyptic gangster rap from the Paris hoods, gay house, Congolese rhumba, chanson française, Hebrew religious songs, arty hip-hop from New York, Zouk from the Antilles, salsa from Havana, crooner slows from the 1980s, accordion cheese, Arabic trad, Algerian raï, French R&B for suburban girlies, weird cinematic soundtracks about geese flying to Moscow. Parisians approach music rather like food: they want to taste every dish that human civilisation has ever invented.

Murphy attributes this wild eclecticism to several factors. France is better known for painting, literature, and cinema than for music; hence its relatively small music industry “does not possess the arrogance and influential export market that the pop music scene in London is renowned for” and is free to play what it wants. He also posits that theater is a subliminal artistic reference point for the French, resulting in a strange combination of musical tastes:

Caught in a split personality between the brooding of Northern Europe and the simplicity of Mediterranean culture, it’s almost as if the French still don’t know whether music is supposed to be stupid or serious, ironic or first degree.

Murphy notes that many talented artists who failed to launch their careers in their homelands end up being the toast of Paris. For example, have you ever heard of the U.S. folk singer Alela Diane? Neither had I. But Murphy reports that this “rising genius” has gotten huge exposure through repeated plays on France Inter, the country’s news, society and culture broadcaster, launching her on national tours. “The Paris music scene does not have any special secret to teach the world’s musicians,” he writes, “except maybe that the expectations and values of your audience will denote the ambitions and content of your work.”

Source: The Journal of Music (subscription required for full article)

An anonymous guerilla artist known as Princess Hijab has been drawing dark veils, or “hijabizing,” the scantily clad and sexualized women who appear on advertising around Paris. “Princess Hijab knows that L’Oréal and Dark&Lovely have been killing her little by little,” according to the artist’s website. Her response is more anti-corporate than religious, but in a city with a history of tension surrounding headscarves, the religious implications are inevitable.

“There’s no way of knowing if Princess Hijab is a hijabi. Or even a Muslim,” Ethar wrote for the excellent Muslimah Media Watch blog back in December. That aspect makes the project more intriguing. The artist describes herself as “not involved in any lobby or movement be it political, religious or to do with advertising.” In fact, if she’s not a Muslim, Ethar writes that she could lend “credibility to the idea that the dislike of being exposed to ‘visual aggression’ is not necessarily rooted in religious belief.”

Since she was profiled on the Muslimah Media Watch blog, her Flicker page and her Art Review profiles have been taken down, but more information is available from an interview with Menassat.

(Thanks, the Scoop.)

Image courtesy of Princess Hijab.

Sources: Princess Hijab, Muslimah Media Watch, Menassat

A dramatic BBC report finds Vélib, Paris’ extensive bike-share program, in dire straits. The article claims that half of Vélib’s 15,000 bikes have “disappeared” and that many others have been vandalized, “[h]ung from lamp posts, dumped in the River Seine, torched and broken into pieces.” The director of JCDecaux, the company that runs the rental system for the city, warns that the program can’t be sustained without some serious changes.

How accurate is the story? Kottke.org found a smart posting on Streetsblog that challenges the BBC’s more sensational assertions. It quotes sources—including Paris’ Deputy Mayor of Transportation—who say JCDecaux is renegotiating their contract and encouraging the negative coverage to get the city to pay more into the program.

Apparently, JCDecaux zealously guards data on the costs and profits associated with Vélib, so it's a bit hard to objectively assess how it's doing. Since its launch, though, it's generally been regarded as a success. So, as more cities plan similar intiatives—The Bike-sharing Blog counts 92 existing programs and notes that the number's growing quickly—it'll be important to keep tabs on the public's perception of Vélib.

Image courtesy of Luc Legay, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources:  BBC , Kottke.org , Streetsblog, The Bike-sharing Blog.     

Dorothy Polley, New York expat and owner of Dorothy’s Gallery in Paris, has commissioned 30 artists to create paintings, sketches, videos, and other media inspired by Barack Obama. The artists are mostly French, with a few notable Americans (like cartoonist Edward Koren) featured as well.

Inspired by the Manifest Hope gallery in Denver, Polley organized the show in less than a month, paying the artists out of her own pocket. In addition to the art, Polley has organized several events designed to raise awareness and funds for Obama’s campaign like a fundraiser cocktail party, a roundtable discussion with members of Democrats Abroad, and an evening of music conceived with Obama in mind.

The show runs from October 3 to November 17, with a portion of the proceeds from the sale of works going to the Obama campaign. It’s unclear if Obama actually needs more money, but with so much art, music, fashion, and even poetry coming out of the presidential race, the national trend of political creativity was bound to catch on overseas sooner or later.

Image by Cyril Anguelidis, courtesy of Dorothy Polley.

I couldn’t resist visiting Alec Soth’s photography exhibit in Paris’s Jeu de Paume museum this week to see how he would present my fellow Minnesotans to an art-inundated Parisian audience. Soth stuck to his usual silent juxtapositions to show Midwesterners in all our frumpy, snow-covered simplicity.

Soth’s exhibit would be a little bit of home, I mistakenly reasoned. Instead, the exhibit drew from four photo series and was “home” only if you consider the geographical bounds for a Minnesota artist to be the limits of the United States (Minnesota, Niagara Falls, and along the Mississippi River) and then stretch the boundary a bit further to accommodate the birthplace of Soth’s adopted daughter (Bogota, Colombia).

The last room held photos from a series titled “Paris, Minnesota,” which Soth did for the 2007 fashion season (January through March.) I forced myself to look at the pictures before the title plaques and guess which photos were from Paris and which from Minnesota. Soth didn’t play any tricks. The shots of a star-studded dinner, suited men, and a dog so valuable it had its own bodyguard were, predictably, taken in Paris. The Minnesota photos were equally unsurprising: an ice skater, a girl in a ski cap, and a parka-clad woman clutching a Coco Chanel bag, posed in front of a strip mall.

At first, I was disappointed Soth didn’t defy convention and take, say, photos of hipsters in Minneapolis and Paris to show their interchangeability. Soth could have upset every smug Frenchman’s assumption that we Americans live in a cultural backwater. Then I calmed down. Mocking Minnesotans is a classic—not to mention lucrative—strategy for native artists from Garrison Keillor to the Coen brothers. Besides, the original audience for the photos was not buying fashion magazines for stereotype-challenging images. And I can always comfort myself with the fact that Paris boutiques sell Red Wing boots and Minnetonka moccasins. If the clientele only realized.

 —Lisa Gulya

The power of architecture as a way to imagine an ideal society is alive in Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut. His most recent project, a pair of proposed Paris buildings dubbed Anti-Smog, is a testament to green design concepts, featuring solar power, wind power, and a “smog eating exterior,” according to Ali Kriscenski of the design blog Inhabitat.

The prototype for the project shows one football-shaped building known as Solar Drop. “The exterior is fitted with 250 square meters of solar photovoltaic panels and coated in titanium dioxide (TiO2),” writes Kriscenski. “The PV system produces on-site electrical energy while the TiO2 coating works with ultraviolet radiation to interact with particulates in the air, break down organics and reduce airborne pollutants and contaminants.”

The second structure, the Wind Tower, harnesses the gusting urban winds for energy.

The buildings are designed to be suspended over a Parisian canal and a defunct railroad track. Anti-Smog would be used as art galleries, public meeting rooms, and gathering spaces. Learn more about the project here.

—Erik Helin