Ottawa: 1984

I just finished reading this article.

If I said I was surprised, I would be lying."A Rideau Street clothing store has covered up controversial images of police officers that appeared earlier this week on a new downtown mural". It is not so much that the anti-police imaging spurred a complaint from the "city's mural department" {we have a city mural department?} and I do acknowledge that anything anti-police in Ottawa right now is a touchy subject... but rather I am left shaking my head at the my following quote from Peggy DuCharme.

image via freshnessmag

“We never committed to give them any money and we certainly didn’t pull any money because of whatever, it was never there in the first place,” she said, adding the store’s proposal was not completed in time to be considered for the 2011 budget cycle.

Ducharme said she also objected to the mural because it features the word “obey” — the name of a clothing line launched by the artist in 2001 — and could be thus perceived as advertising.

“The city staff that approved it may not have been well enough informed on urban culture and advertising to have caught that, but we certainly know that that’s advertising,” she said.

Peterson said the word “obey” has been an integral part of Fairey’s career and appears heavily throughout much of his work. It began as a sticker campaign more than 20 years, long before the clothing line was launched.

Read the entire Ottawa Citizen article here.

We aren't exactly the first city to be spruced up by an Obey mural and I am not even touching the advertising comment because it is the perfect example of how out of touch they truly are with said "urban culture".