Advertising Art: The 50 Smartest Culture Jams

Advertising Anarchy: 50 Brilliant Billboard Manipulations

Advertising is around us constantly. Even if you think you're beyond being susceptible to those glossy images of perfection, you've been taken in by it before, and you will be again.

Taken at face value, it's not hard to see through advertising - the perfect airbrushed faces, the posed laughs, the impeccable interiors. And for some guerilla artists, this fallacy makes for the ultimate inspiration.

Welcome to Culture Jamming, the movement that mixes politics with graffiti, and satire with paint.

A campaign tackles the health associations of McDonald's food.

Coined in 1984, the term refers to the efforts by artists around the world to reclaim the public space taken up by advertising by subverting their messages using everything from full blown cover ups to strategically placed letters - such as 'EAT?' after the ubiquitous McDonald's arch.

We spoke to culture jamming old timer Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada recently, who maintains that the street is as much of a canvas now as it ever was.

A point which is well-proven by this collection of culture jams on poster and billboards around the world - showing that adverts don't just have to be controversial to come up against criticism, but merely exist at all.

What do you think? Are these images making a point or just making a mess?

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