In my opinion, however, there's a big difference between contributing to an existing piece, adding to it creatively, or even covering it (creatively) to make way for a new thought or idea, and obnoxiously spraying a bland tag over the entire thing.

People hate Shepard Fairey. They think he's a sell out, they think he's a plagarist, they think he's a hack. Whatever they think, they hate him for it and they're downright giddy when his stuff gets bombed. Sometime in the early morning hours of Sunday, May 15th, Fairey's These Parties Disgust Me mural, which was pasted up over a faux wall on Houston Street at the end of last month, was tagged.

It's not the first time someone has taken aim at the piece - before the pasting was even complete,  it had been tagged. A brick was tossed through it and a portion of it was kicked in before the artist's Mayday show opened on May 1st. With Fairey hoping to keep the mural relatively in tact until the show opening, the mural was repaired and cleaned soon after each incident, however, with the month almost over and the show's run coming to an end, the wall is now fair game to taggers and Shep haters alike.

I know why people don't like Shepard Fairey, but I don't really understand it, or the need to purposefully destroy his work. He's a commercial artist now, yes. Absolutely. He makes money, he sells work, and yes, his work is, more often than not, derivative of other people's or a reinterpreation of a photograph. I don't really see it as plagiarism, though. Plagiary, to me, would be him taking someone else's work outright, unaltered, pasting it up and calling it his own - that's really not what this guy does.

Fairey's work has a very definitive style to it. It's a combination of formats and looks and often speaks to an idea that the original work was not intended for. He's not tearing pages out of books and throwing them up on walls, he's creating something new from something existing. All art comes from somewhere or something else. How we see it is, of course, extremely subjective. For example: To me, all tags look generally the same. Bubble letters or graffiti scrawl. Thousands of tags and maybe.... 3-4 styles of actual tag. One could really make the argument that taggers are just copying each other over and over again and just swapping out names. It's not very artistic. It's nothing new or interesting. It doesn't take much thought.

The Mayday mural was a nice piece. Fairey himself said that he hoped it would remain there for some time and become a collaborative work, which could have been really cool. Throwing a huge, nasty looking tag over it, though... I just don't see the point, the artistry, or the statement in that. I could ramble about this for a long time, and I won't even get into what happened to the four NYC Banksy's, but my main point is mostly that it sucks to see something destroyed out of spite. Let it go, people.

If you're into it, you've probably already heard, but anonymous and notorious street artist, Banksy, has finally landed in New York City. At least four new pieces have gone up in the past day or two, (3 in Manhattan and at least one in DUMBO). The one seen above is on Cedar St. at Trinity Place down in the Financial District. By the time I reached it, someone had already stickered a piece of it. Apparently it's been further vandalized over night, with someone scribbling white all over the figure. (Bastards.)

I haven't heard anything about the piece in DUMBO being hit, which is nice to know as it's pretty awesome. (See below.)

Other sightings have been reported in Chinatown and Soho. Happy hunting, fans!

*Update*: Spoke too soon re: the DUMBO Banksy. They've all been bombed. More on that soon.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Sick New Feature From Adobe Photoshop CS5

Seems like just yesterday I was watching the Online Announcement Event for Adobe's CS4 Creative Suite. ( What a site. A grown man screaming like a little girl in front of his computer in the middle of work.)

Well the Cs5 release is just around the corner and I just saw a video preview on one of their new features called Content Aware Fill. This tool makes taking out unwanted crap from images as easy as picking your nose. Make a selection around the shitty and wallah, PRETTY!

Check out the video, I guarantee you'll wet yourself .

In our first post for the new year, I'd like to bring to your attention a little thing that Duane Reade is doing to NYers. If you're not familiar with Duane Reade, it is a local pharmacy chain here in NYC in the same vain as CVS, Walgreens or Rite Aid. First of all let me say this, because I haven't said it before on Word Vomit, but Duane Reade sucks balls for their new hideous designs. They're logo is wretched and the new color palettes they've introduced makes me want to urinate on the Pantone color book that was given to their graphic designer(s).

With that being said, not only have they introduced pastels of doom, they had the nerve to re-do their Spending Rewards Program. This was the only shining thing about the store. In these uncertain economic times, us NYers have come to rely on DR's rewards system. For every dollar you spend, 1 point is given. For every 100 points you get a, $5 coupon is issued. This was good. Those things came in handy, because you could get about $10 every month or so from DR, if you spent enough and sometimes you could. We've come to rely on them. It was a nice gift. Clearly, they saw this and decided to ruin it. So to pay for their expesnive and sucky store remodeling and to pay those awful graphic designers who changed their look, they had to go say fuck you NY and then proceeded to rape us in the face.

They had a mandatory change to the new RewardsFlex program. So this is how it goes now:

For every dollar you spend, 2 points are given. Pretty cool.

For every 500 points you get, $5 coupon is given out to you. Wait what the fuck?!

I roughly had to spend $100 to get $5 back. Now I have to spend $500 to get $5 back? Are you fucking kidding me? I have to spend $500 in Duane Reade? Best Buy doesn't even have the balls to do that and they sell fucking tvs and other shit!

For once I am utterly appalled by this and I wanted to channel my Jewish brethren and write a stern letter of disapproval and vow never to shop in their store again, but then I said to myself, where the hell will I shop at 1:OOAM when I need something? Fuck. Trapped like mice in a cage. Sneaky bastards. They've cornered me with this horrible points system. Do you know how long you could go before you'd spend $500 in Duane Reade? You could go months before you saw a $5 coupon. I'd rather not use it now.

Thanks very, much Duane Reade. I've never willing gotten raped in the face before until now and I've got to tell you -- if you're gonna be raping people in the face like this was Ozwald Penitentiary at least have the decency to have Christopher Meloni around. Fuckers.

So, the Under Consideration off-shoot, Brand New, has posted their Best and Worst Identities of 2009. I have to admit, I was surprised to see AOL coming in at the top of the list for best rebrand, though upon reading the reasoning for it, I can appreciate it a bit more.

The list is pretty solid on both sides. My favorites from the "best" section are probably Syfy, The New York Public Library, Nickelodeon, and (funnily enough) My Little Pony. I'm also partial to El Banco Deuno.

From the "worst" list, I'm on board with most. I never particularly cared for the Art Director's Club logo, but it's also kind of iconic at this point. Changing it to something so un-unique and... pink? I don't get the thought process there. The only one I'm somewhat iffy on is the one for Yale University Press. I didn't much care for the old logo and there's nothing wrong with the new one - which they pretty much say on their explanation on the site. I just don't get why it would be listed under worst of the year if the only reason is that they're sad to see the other one go. Duane Reade is conspicuously missing - or maybe it was 2008 and missed the cut off? They should have made an exception.

I was expecting to be watching it tomorrow, but  it's been pushed back until next week (12/8), due to some President address thingy happening now.  Definitely check it out. I love the spy aspects of this thing. Also in true unnecessary nerd reaction, the director mentioned that there hasn't been any new holiday shows created in a long time. Unfortunately, she's balls wrong. Dreamworks popped that cherry with Shrek the Halls in '07 and it'll be shown again this year. Then there's also Merry Madagascar that came out 2 weeks ago.

Who gives a fuck anyway?! Just watch it and enjoy the awesomeness of it all!

Obey that Giant. YAY!

Enough Said!

Look, I love a clever ad as much as the next person, but come on... is the hairy asshole really necessary?

Also... think about the message here - 100% recycled AND you're pulling it out of someone else's ass. Not a big sell point!