FRED RADTKE SPEAKS OUT: New Orleans, Times Picayune article by Doug MacCash, Art Critic, Sept. 11, 2009 regarding Skylar Fein “Youth Manifesto”

Once again, I find myself humbled, by having Doug MacCash, art critic for the Times Picayune, writing an article about an up and coming artist, Skylar Fein, exhibiting his art, in the New Orleans art museum.

To quote Mr. MacCash, “the most powerful piece in the show isn’t a paean to punk rock, though it has the same spirit of adolescent outrage.  Fein’s enormous blinking sign dedicated to New Orleans’ premier graffiti writer “Harsh”, is a stunning piece of carpentry.  The 5 feet tall custom-made shadow-box letters, laced with strings of small light bulbs, are meant to shine from the second-floor museum windows over city park, like a theater marquee, so that people can “come here at night with dates, eat ice cream cones, and watch the beauty of Harsh”, Fein said.  Fein said his affection for spray-painted Harsh tags began in the months after the flooding that followed hurricane Katrina in 2005.  He welcomed the brusque message “broadcasting out over the spectacular destruction”, like a beacon of post-Katrina reality.

“I thought, “Yes, that’s it.  He speaks for me. He speaks for everyone I know”.  That was the golden age of Harsh.”

Near the blinking Harsh sign, Fein has created a small room to be lit with a set of smaller flashing letters that spell out “the Gray Ghost”, a reference to Harsh’s nemesis, graffiti eradicator Fred Radtke.   In New Orleans, gray is the symbolic opposite of graffiti, it also is the symbolic opposite of youth.

            Fein said that “Youth Manifesto is not an autobiographical walk down Memory Lane, as we might expect. As a “good kid” growing up in New York City, he felt that the graffiti that coated the subway stations and trains represented some sort of collapse of society.  It was only later that he began to feel graffiti was thought-provoking.  And it was only later in life that he discovered hard-edged music.

            Well, as I said in the beginning of this article, I am humbled…I have finally made it into the New Orleans Museum of Art, I thank you….

Second, I want to thank Skylar Fein for his artwork.  No matter what anybody thinks of it, it is inthe New Orleans Museum of Art, not in the street on someones’ property that has been vandalized.   But Skylar, you left out the most important part of the display.  You left the word “Top Mob”, that Harsh has been using for ten years. That’s right, you’ve only been in town four years.   Harsh has been using “Top Mob” to intimidate neighborhoods with fear, not knowing if a drug dealer, or gang, is marking his or their territory in the neighborhood.  Also, you left out the part that he has done over $500,000 in damage to the citizens of New Orleans.  In your bio, you said you were a card carrying member of the socialist party, and spent a year in Russia….

I was wondering in the four years you were here, have you ever paid taxes to the City of New Orleans or owned property?  The reason I asked was, it’s easy to have, in your words “affection for spray-painted Harsh tags in the months after the flooding that followed hurricane Katrina in 2005.”   You also said “he (Harsh) welcomed the brusque message broadcasting out over the spectacular destruction, like a beacon of post-Katrina reality.”

            You may think it was a “spectacular destruction”, but people who died, lived through the experience, lost everything they every owned, including their dignity, didn’t think it was” motion picture spectacular”.  While you saw an opportunity to pick up post-flood wreckage, like other opportunists, the citizens of New Orleans up to this very day are trying to pick up their lives.

            So when you said “I thought, “Yes, that’s it. He (Harsh} speaks for me.  He speaks for everyone I know,” that was the golden age of Harsh”.

            Well, apparently not all people agree with you, including the art critic who wrote about your exhibit…in an article in Nola.com, September, 15, 2008, Doug MacCash wrote, and I quote, “As an art lover, many people seemed to assume that I was pro-graffiti and against those who sought to eliminate it.  Truth is, there was always a part of me that admired the single-mindedness and dedication of New Orleans’ anti-graffiti crusader Fred Radtke, aka the Gray Ghost.  Radtke always seemed to take the job of removing graffiti much more seriously than the lackadaisical local graffiti artists took in applying it.

            I never much cared if Radtke grayed over the various tags and doodles hastily sprayed here and there. Not because they were illegal, but because they were self-indulgent and stupid. The big balloony signatures and faux primitive drawings that passed for street art in New Orleans weren’t worth defending.

            Let’s face it.  It’s not 1980 anymore. Old-school graffiti is old hat.  I’m sorry to be the one to tell them, but Harsh, Top Mob, and other nocturnal scribblers are, well, boring.”

            Well Sky, if Dougy thought Harsh/Top Mob, even he got it right, thought Harsh was boring in 2008, what do think he is in 2009…Boring with lights. Tell the guy who has the ice cream cone concession stand, he better get another location, because it’s going to be a slow couple months.  And as far as Harsh goes, he has put the perception of crime in this town, that is losing tourism, economic development, and quality of life for our citizens.  By the way, in Art daily.org, you say your hometown is New York.  Well, is it New York or New Orleans?  A well known artist with a gallery, related guys like you are called cultural carpetbaggers…maybe instead of calling your exhibit “Youth Manifesto”, since you are 41 years old, you might want to call it “Mid-Life Crisis”….