This week’s Link Love edition kinda rocks. Hole is back together. You can lose weight on the Coachella Diet. What’s up with disposable chopsticks? NYC is way too gentrified and more…

WTF? It’s the Coachella Diet. For reals. [via Well+GoodNYC]

Does Girls Night Out include takeout Chinese food? Better bring your own chopsticks. [via Eat Drink Better]

You knew she’d never really go away. Courtney Love reunites Hole. [via Spin]

Hey look! It’s the NYC nobody remembers. [via Grist]

Is there really such a thing as conscious fashion? [via Mommy Greenest]

Related on EcoSalon

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Link Love: Ikea Saves Space + Secrets of Coffee Pods + Vaccines by the Numbers

Link Love: Are You a Closet Diet Coke Drinker? + How to Quit Your Job + CA Stepping Up for Orcas

Image via Spin

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The gentrification of graffiti as art.

Does haute graffiti spell liberty or death for street art? There are many layers to that question, which is not to be taken figuratively in the slightest. This week LA-based graffiti darling RETNA became the latest sanctioned artist to take on the famous graffiti wall at Bowery and Houston, replacing a previously sanctioned installation by Brooklyn duo Faile.

Here is a video of RETNA taken during his process:

An interesting 57-seconds of performance art: have you ever seen a more perfect circle? It’s also an unexpected and unintentional piece of historical theater, too. What was once a clandestine, subversive, anti-establishment, “up yours” middle finger to the powers that be – with the added thrill of being where you’re not supposed to be, dodging the law during the most criminal of hours of the night and early morn’ – has become mainstream, lunch hour entertainment on one of the most gentrified corners in the nation.

RETNA, a.k.a. Marquis Lewis, himself seems bemused at his own mainstream success. In an interview with ELLE, he recalls his ascent to becoming one of the most sought after street artists this side of Banksy.

“[I]t wasn’t really called street art at that time, it was just graffiti. When I first saw it I knew that was what I wanted to do I just never really thought that it would turn into a career.”

And quite a career it is. From being arrested as a kid in the name of honing his art, to the Bowery and beyond (i.e., his full scale hieroglyphic installation on a $60 million private jet), he has very much arrived.

Meanwhile, the Bowery’s “arrival” is a bonified “nuh duh” at this point. Obviously. And on today’s Bowery, it would not be a stretch to assume that few passersby know of the history and significance of the Bowery Graffiti Wall – or the many, many layers underneath.

Complex offers a thorough must-read history of the wall. In summary, three decades ago Keith Haring did the wall’s first mural, said to be his first large-scale public work. It was then bombed and pieced (more on that in a minute) by illegal graffiti until curator Jeffrey Deitch and developer (and wall owner) Tony Goldman began sanctioning off murals on the wall to high profile contemporary artists in 2008.

Haring’s wall

The Os Gemeos version of the wall of 2009

May Day by Shepard Fairey

In fitting fashion, the new installations have been targeted over the years by NYC graffiti writers many times, from tagging…

…to out and out destruction revealing the layers underneath.

Bombing and Tagging vs. Mural-izing

The level of street art these days bears little resemblance to the tags of Cool “Disco” Dan, though even he is recognized as an artist in his own right. His work is owned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and featured in books; he credits his tagging with keeping him alive and out of jail throughout the 80s and 90s during DC’s crack-smoking mayor’s, “murder capital of the world” years.

Decades later, the city government is nurturing future Disco Dans through its MuralsDC program, like the Deitch/Goldman collaboration but on a more civic scale. The intention is to keep kids out of trouble via bombing (spraying or marking a wall with one’s tag, or name, i.e., Che, Sleazy, Stamp, or Moe) and piecing (large scale abstract forms).

This tagging, piecing, mural-izing distinction is interesting to keep in mind when you consider the war raging across the pond between the world’s most famous street artist, Banksy, and the artist with the most street cred, King Robbo.

The two have been battling it out for the past three years after Bansky “improved upon” a piece King Robbo had created in a nearly-impossible-to-reach location twenty four years prior.

Face-slapping, resentments and destruction ensued. Team King Robbo was born.

In another touch of irony, this video captures one neighbor’s dismay at the willful destruction of property, a casualty of the graffiti war. He calls it a “horrific stain,” “a random act of vandalism,” done at the hands of wild, out of control kids.

The addition of red paint certainly changes things, but isn’t this street art?

Images: Wright Wedding; Bowery Boogie; Business Insider; Complex; Cool Disco Dan; The Guardian; BBC News

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Australians turn to artists to help with urban blight.

Consider colonized Williamsburg, not the Commonwealth one in Virginia but the gentrified and rarified one rife with models and brunching. A few decades ago, no one but the artist would venture there, drawn by the affordable convenience of massive swathes of abandoned industrial space. It was very much artist vs. the city. Eventually commercial and nonprofit development groups took note, and sought to replicate the formula in cities like St. Louis, Detroit and Cleveland.

The formula being: artists are natural born leaders in rescuing decentralized cities from blight, even transforming them into the next hot place to call home.

Each of the aforementioned cities has succeeded in turning their industrialized wastelands around, to a varying extent. Now, our comrades down under are attempting the same.

Australia is a very big place.

And 89% of its population lives in an urban area making it one of the most urbanized countries in the world.

But the nation of 22 million+ has been steadily creeping towards an urban crisis. An over reliance on cars, economic growth bolstered by highway construction, and shortsighted solutions that are threatening a number of their cities and towns.

A spirited editorial compared Australian sprawl to a cancerous growth on one hand, to America, on the other.

“As the colony sprawls outward, consuming resources and despoiling its environment, the inner core deteriorates. This is the route taken by many older American cities…whose cores were ghetto-ised by policies of sprawl favouring automobile and oil industries.”

Fair enough.

“Why this willful denial by Australians?” the editorial continues. “Partly it might be a consequence of our historical ‘escape’ from crowded and often terrible urban conditions in Europe. Like Americans, the promise of wide open virgin lands, seemingly allowing endless expansion and a quarter acre for everyone appeared feasible and was built into a persuasive cult. But it was never true, never sustainable.”

America holds that truth to be self-evident.

As such, social enterprise group Renew Australia is seeking to bolster their city cores by pairing up artists with abandoned commercial spaces in Newcastle, Adelaide and Townsville.

Working under the premise that cities “play an integral part in bringing together diverse communities, offering an alternative to unsustainable urban sprawl and providing a real sense of public space,” they find short and long-term solutions for vacant and abandoned properties until they become viable businesses or are redeveloped.

Started in Newcastle by writer, broadcaster and arts festival director Marcus Westbury in 2008, the program bills itself as “a permanent structure for temporary things.”

Renew has since gone national, a pairing that grants property owners, caretakers and the downtown another opportunity to become cool again.

Images: Brian Costelloe; NASA; Winter for Elbows; Renew Australia; ZeHawk

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