Illegal Art Cont.: Spraypaint and Lightbulbs

Feik, via Eyegunk

After writing about Illegal Art and copyright, I started seeing different kinds of illegal art everywhere. Note that in the center of the graffiti by Felik in San Paolo is a birdcage holding a can of spray paint. :)

In Hungary, 'Wash Your Dirty Money With My Art' wasn't deemed art by the authorities (via ArtMargins):

In the summer of 2008, János Sugár exhibited the sentence "Wash your dirty money with my art" at the Kunsthalle, Budapest, as part of an exhibition entitled What's up?(1). Parallel with exhibiting the sentence in this safe context, he also displayed it on the pavement in front of and on the wall of two private art institutions in Budapest. Soon after this, one of these institutions sued him for damaging its property. After Sugár's exhibition at the Kunsthalle it was easy to identify him as the artist, and soon Sugár was summoned by the police and prosecuted. Sugár admitted that he had sprayed the sentences and added that he considered them a continuation of the art work he had earlier displayed at the Kunsthalle. However, Sugár's gesture was not deemed art by the authorities and was classified as vandalism.

Street art might be par for the course, but no lightbulbs in Europe...?

LIGHTS OUT FOR LIGHTBULB ARTWORKS? via ArtForum
Come September 1, the European Union has banned the sale of traditional lightbulbs with a glowing filament. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Till Briegleb reports, the ban will have an impact on art, specifically works that use lightbulbs for either functional, aesthetic, or historical effects. A case in point is the work of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, who often hangs a bare lightbulb in his installations as a melancholic homage to the Soviet-era ideal of electricity, which was not always available to the citizens.
“Unfortunately, there are no exceptions to [the law] 2005/32/EG” writes Briegleb. “And thus artists, restorers, and museum technicians find themselves faced with the bizarre necessity of small-time criminality.” Kabakov is not the only artist to use bulbs. There are 140 in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space-Modulator; the German post–Word War II “Zero” Group was fond of lightbulbs. There’s a host of contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, Jorge Pardo, Valie Export, Stephan Huber, Isa Genzken, Mike Kelley, and Adrian Paci. Even artists who did not work explicitly with lightbulbs have used them: Rauschenberg, Kienholz, Tinguely, and Beuys.