The Future of Advertising

Love those crazy Berliners! Once again, the city has inspired acts of resistance that could spread like a virus, in fact, ought to spread like a virus. My favorite artistic inspiration:

At 5:37 a.m. on April 2, 2002, the Parisian artist Zevs kidnapped a 10-meter (33-feet) model advertising Lavazza coffee from one of Berlin's main squares, Alexanderplatz. To be sure, the ad slogan "Express yourself!" was asking for trouble. Within a few hours, Zevs had cut the lady from the ad and left a note: "Visual Kidnapping -- Pay now." Zevs then issued a written statement demanding a €500,000 ($638,694) ransom. Just to make it clear he wasn't fooling around, he severed one of the model's fingers and mailed it to the company headquarters in Turin. Before the police could catch him, he escaped to Sweden.

From then on, Zevs toured the art galleries of Europe with a documentary film about his "kidnapping" and the kidnapped model itself, rolled up for convenient transportation. Two years ago, he asked visitors of Berlin's New Society for the Visual Arts (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst) to take a vote about whether the model should be "executed." Last year, he finally returned her to the Lavazza company, following a sham ransom payment. Zevs is on a mission.

So if you're getting bored with your summer...