Times Square: Art or Advertisement?

The focus of this project was Times Square and its billboards. The reason we chose this was because of an article that we were reading called Turning NYC’s Times Square Billboards Into Art Exhibit. A Dutch student is hoping to buy out every single billboard in Times for one day, which would cost about $24 million, in order to make a massive public art project. What got us interested, however, was that he said that he wanted the whole world to see art, not only advertisement. “It’s a sad fact that you can only see art in museum — that you really have to pay $15 to go see art.” He wants to make it more of a ‘New York Square.’ We believe that it although it is advertisement, the billboards can also be considered art. It is not necessarily the ‘old’ art, or the art that we see in the museums, but it is a form of public art. Although the intention might be to advertise, the layout, and the amount of tourism that Times Square gets, makes the place sort of like an outdoor museum with futuristic art. Through doing this project, we learned quite a lot about Times Square that we did not know previously, although we have been there a few times. I think what impressed us was that it was one man’s idea to name the area after the New York Times. One man’s idea brought life to one of the most famous cities in the world. Something else that we learned and found surprising was the requirement to have a billboard of some kind on buildings and the amount of money it takes to have an ad. on one of the billboards.