Paul Smith's flagship store was 'b0mbed' ('spraypainted') by a graffiti 'artist' this last week.   The building, a shocking pink, has become a Los Angeles landmark for a most unexpected reason - it has become a 'selfie wall'.   For whatever unfathomable reason the heretofore unadorned slab of pink has 'gone viral' as a place to have one's photo taken - usually by way of selfie-stick.   Even minor celebs and fashion models have joined in the endless lemming-parade to photograph themselves surrounded in pink.

      It was foregone, however, that these giant pink slabs would prove too tempting to local street artists; one night not so long ago he, or they, swooped in to adorn one entire wall with "Go Fuck Ur Selfie".   What irony (!) - where a plain pink wall (described by Superlative Journalism's breathless scribes as 'iconic') couldn't raise an eyebrow in the International Press, defacement by graff vandals became instantly most newsworthy, indeed.


      It would seem that, after viewing the photos above (and virtually identical photos in a hundred other outlets), the consensus would be there had been a gross defacement of a commercial building.   While there were many who saw it that way, the overall response was surprisingly mixed.   For example, many neighbors were 'in common cause' with the sentiment expressed in spraypaint - because of the unending torrent of selfie-seeking tourists who have been taking up the lion's share of parking - to include parking designated for residents during certain hours.   Other dyed-in-the-wool pro-graffers predictably praised the spraying as 'an expression of art'.   And there were others who just saw the pink wall as symbolizing the vanity, the self-indulgence and the manifest irrelevence of the social media set in general - many of them sending their message by (you guessed it) taking selfies in front of the spraypainted sentiment, their middle fingers raised, off-flipping the world.

      And as expected : the unending back-and-forth texts and chats by those social-medialogues who firmly believe they, and they alone, know the true path to social responsibility.   They, each of them, are damn-sure going to teach those other chat-heads who don't agree.   ...Or at the very least, get in the last word.   It is too bad these huge swaths of the human population don't have lives to go back to once, or if, they go off-line....

Graphic excerpts above are from Internet sources, and are, under current legal precedents and prevailing interpretations
considered 'Fair Use' under Copyright Law.   Copyright of all original artwork resides exclusively with the artists.