I was in The Peoples Republic today, visiting America's Most Dysfunctional Four Blocks, as the Central Square Area is affectionately known around the Orphanage.  Gad, what a miasma of toxic human effluvia that is.  But every so often I like to walk around there, Just sort of daydreaming I'm in a Pieter Bruegel The Elder painting.  I've been reading Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year — about the Great Plague of 1665-66 that wiped out almost a quarter of the population of London — and thank goodness for medical science, is all I've got to say, or there wouldn't be a Central Square.

Anyway, I always like to see what new graffiti's popped up around there, since, among its other charms, it seems to be a sort of tagger's paradise.  And I have been thinking a lot about art lately, in advance of the launch of a new website (more about which in a future post) — particularly what it is and isn't or what is and isn't it, which may or may not be the same question.  So I felt like I'd stumbled upon a kindred spirit when I came upon this brazen graffito on one of those painted switchboxes...


Is this a declaration of war on The Cambridge Arts Council, one of those feel-good let's-round-up-a-bunch-of-kids-and-jazz-up-the-train-station type organizations? But can you really blame them?  Let's face it: kid labor is cheap, and who's going to criticize kid art? 


It's fool-proof. 

The picture above is from the Broadway T station.  The cash-strapped MBTA, that most cynical of government bureaucracies, has been using child-labor to supposedly humanize its red and orange line stations for years (the up-side is that the children were able to retire in the second grade with full pensions and health benefits).  The most recent example of kid-art on the T is the new Charles/MGH stop, where a massive, gently curving wall of glass has been marred — er, I mean elegantly accented by what appears from ground level to be a grid of super-sized shrinky-dinks...

 
See, I bet right now you're thinking to yourself: why is this guy attacking shrinky dinks?  Why does he hate kids?  What has he got against putting them to work for the city?

Rest assured, gentle reader, I, too, had a childhood love affair with Shrinky-dinks, Crayola Crayons, and Play-doh.  And like all normal kids I set my Barbies on fire, stripped my Ken doll naked and forced him to fellate my G.I. Joes at knife-point. Boys will be boys.  And some will be girls. It's all good.

And to be fair, Davis Square Station has some of the cutest kid tiles around...


...that look like actual children, and not chimpanzees, did them.  Not that I have anything against chimpanzees, either.  The least of these I have to say has more artistic merit than the very nearly perfectly dreadful "Davis With a D" wall trash that oppresses outbound riders... 


I can see the review board saying "we need something to spruce up this depressing space. Hey, how about some depressing art!"  Even the name is an abomination. "Davis with a D"? Not Davis with an M?  Or a Q? I mean, How about "Davis with a WTF"?

But while too much of public art is so, so wrong (and obviously this has something to do with a process where a cynical artist can pitch a scrap-metal atrocity as a site-specific piece by slapping a "D" on it at the last minute), sometimes it comes out all right.  And the advantage of living where there's a general overabundance of it is that occasionally you stumble upon something exceptional.  You might have to fight your way through a forest of creepy lifesize concrete zombies in bronze masks, and wade into a morass of bad eighties art, but it might one day be worth it.

A little over ten years ago the switchbox painting craze took Cambridge and Somerville by storm, with decidedly mixed results, as we have already seen.  Somerville's process was a little different, I've gathered, because in Somerville there are a few with some degree of actual artistic merit (in measures appropriate to the project, bear in mind).  I love the one at the intersection of Highland and Cutter Ave., Southeast of Davis Square, immortalizing the heroic adventures of The Miracle 5...

There are others that I like — this swirly one, and the popcorn box at the clusterfuck across from the Somerville Theater...


Talk about site-specific.  LSD and popcorn!  That's Davis Square right there!

At the other extreme of the urban art spectrum, you've got the South End.  I was there earlier in the day, on my way from work to my garden in the Fenway, where I cleared away the dead leaves, raked out the beds, and put the voles in my big wooden tool chest on notice.  This weekend I'll seed some beds with bishops flowers, poppies, bells of Ireland and verbascum. 

But back in Rutland Square, I came across the angriest, outspokenest little rubbish bin in Boston:


It reminds me of something Mae West once said: "I like restraint, if it doesn't go too far."