The Beauty of a Billboard

  Fiercely proud of their skyline, the NY Times printed this interesting article on banning billboards on the Long Island expressway.

The title “Free Speech vs. Beauty” got me thinking about the conflict between advertising and aesthetics in general and when we consider it okay to “ruin the view” for commercial purposes.

 If advertising is a scourge on the face of beauty, who decides where to draw the line? Ads in magazines and newspapers have been the norm since the beginning of time but no one wants a full page on Moroccan Travel Agencies in the middle of their novels. We’ll sit through (and even enjoy) trailers at the beginning of films but when we go to the opera, we don’t expect a preview of the Pirates of Penzance.

 I am from New Jersey, and like all true Jersey girls, I have a tumultuous love-hate relationship with the Jersey Turnpike and with the billboards that define it. On the one hand, they are hideous. On the other hand, the Jersey Turnpike is an ugly highway already and those billboards provided hours of amusement when I was younger. Advertising is always forgiven when it provides entertainment, like the constantly running ads on the Skytrain here in Bangkok, which people stare at glossy-eyed every morning though they have seen the same ones every day for weeks.

 There are places where I wish that billboards would be banned. There is an a gorgeous stretch of I-90 that runs through the Badlands of South Dakota with the most breathtaking views of the Great Plains and the Black Hills: it’s also littered with horrendous advertisements for “1880 town,” “Dinosaur Hill” and “Wall Drug Store.” Neither clever, nor amusing, these billboards simply ruin a naturally beautiful view.

 So let the New Yorkers have their skyline back, as long as they realise that their outrage is a little arbitrary. The real enemies to aesthetic beauty are hanging out beneath a life sized plastic stegosaurus on Dinosaur Hill.