Of Occupy Wall Street, Art and Design


The top news for the past couple of days has been Steve Jobs’ passing away, and the #OccupyWallStreet movement. The movement started September 17th and is still going on. There’s been coverage about it but one can tell that its not the full-coverage that we are all receiving. Though, that is a story for another time and place.

Meanwhile, from all of the recent developments of it, there has been a surge of passionate story-telling be it in a form of a tweet, an interview, ((Watch Jesse LaGraca, from Occupy Wall Street, talk to Fox News here.)) or a written, poetic “official statement” which was recently read out by Keith Olbermann. ((Here’s the post of Keith Olbermann reading out that statement by the NY General Assembly, video and transcript.))

Another product of this, I must say, has been the print-design work that has been made available to the public by Adbusters. The one that stands out the most to me is the visual-art piece with the dancer on the “Charging Bull”.

It’s a memorable composition of images. The Bull, “the symbol of aggressive financial optimism and prosperity” ((Via Wikipedia.)) and Wall Street, has been pranced on by a beautiful, gracious dancer. I think the dancer represents the ebb and flow of the American Dream, and that of civil liberties. Now on top, it is on pace to take control of the bull, not forcefully, but with grace and serenity. She leads the way to success and finds herself on the bull because of how she approached the chaos; not with violence or vengeance, which in this case is represented by the smoky scene and masked crowd in the background. Well, that is how I interpret this piece anyways; it can be different to yours.

Continuing, other ones that I like are:

You may see more works here.

Update
In case you have seen in the news or in bookstores/newsstands, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2011 is “The Protestor”.

The artwork was created by none other than Shepard Fairey. Here is the background story of the piece.