Five museums — New York’s Whitney, Washington’s National Gallery of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — will be taking over 50,000 various outdoor advertising spaces in August, from electronic billboards to bus shelters to subway ads, coast to coast. The Dallas Museum of Art director calls it “the biggest art exhibition ever conceived,” while TBWA agency’s creative global president says it’s a way to “channel desperation into inspiration” for the outdoor industry “under threat.”
Starting today, you can vote up to 10 times every day until May 7th from around 100 works from the museum’s collection; 50 will “win.” Several will be installed in Times Square, in rotation. Using outdoor ad space for displaying art isn’t a novel idea. Times Square Alliance has previously brought art works like Robert Wilson’s amazing video pieces and Steve Lambert’s interactive Capitalism Works For Me! sculptures here, for example, but this voting thing can be fun. Here’s some voting suggestions. How about Margaret Bourke-White’s World’s Highest Standard of Living (1937) photograph juxtaposing a billboard promise with the reality of social inequality? Let’s put it on a billboard.
Thomas Eakins’ Wrestlers (1899)? Hot.
Warhol for the LULZ?
(Image: Stock Photo; George Tooker’s The Subway)
