New York City’s street art scene is, in a certain light, very silly. Though there are many legitimate artists, it’s also full of pretentious blowhards with more opinions than brains. A lot of the art is bad, and a lot of the people are walking cliches. In this video originally posted on Brooklyn Really, filmmaker Daniel Solé sends up the wack parts of street art. The sketch profiles an artist named Stick, hilariously portrayed by David Riley.
“Calling yourself an artist, it’s so pretentious,” Stick says. “I prefer to say I’m a poet whose primary medium is crime.”
Solé nails the cliches: Stick sees the city as his canvas, not someone else’s garage door or van or whatever. He gives a tour to confused Europeans, marvels at what he’s accomplished in his 14 months in New York, and pulls a daring street art stunt that must be seen to believe.
“To be perfectly honest, I am not all that up on street art,” Solé wrote in an email to ANIMAL. “The idea for that episode started with me imagining some guy slapping a sticker up on public property and then running for his life as if anyone would care. For whatever reason, that made me laugh.”
It’s one of four videos on Brooklyn Really, a humor site that launched on March 31. The video series, called “Brooklyn: For Real,” parodies self-satisfied young creative types in Brooklyn. Other personalities include Comedian, Meditator, and Activist.
“I chose these personalities because they were ridiculous enough to be funny and real enough for me to buy them as actual people,” Solé writes. “I wrote one episode about a woman who runs a pre-school for adults who want to spend a few hours a week drinking out of juice boxes and having nap time together. Then I decided that veered too far into cartoonish territory,” so he cut it. But then, just a few days ago, he saw an article about a group of folks doing just that.
“In Brooklyn, of course,” he writes.
