Twitter user @bshigeta via Instagram

A Silver Lake billboard that recently hawked Avion tequila took on a very different tone last month. "SUPPORT PUBLIC EDUCATION OR FACE CATASTROPHE!" read the near-apocalyptic message in stark black type. On Santa Monica Boulevard, the wisdom of Robert Frost crept by in the same foot-tall, all-caps characters, wrapped around a Metro bus: "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

This campaign, which launched in October and has quickly become both the best-looking and most ubiquitous advertising on L.A.'s streets, is produced by art organization ForYourArt to benefit the Los Angeles Fund for Public Education (or LA Fund for short), a nonprofit co-founded by LAUSD superintendent John Deasy last year. And the artist is none other than the legendary Barbara Kruger, whose signature black, white and red graphics -- like a public service announcement meets reassuring Mad Men-era advertising -- reads spectacularly well in L.A.'s urban environment.

The LA Fund is hoping to raise $1.5 million by the spring to fund a new initiative called Arts Matter and Kruger's work -- actually an original, site-specific piece named Untitled, (Human History) -- is meant to work on two levels, says LA Fund executive director Dan Chang. The campaign is meant to both communicate the critical importance of arts education funding to Angelenos and deliver that art to the city in a kind of mobile gallery. "It's about the awareness of getting public art into the streets of L.A. and making it accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise see it."

Over $4 million in ad space was donated by Clear Channel and CBS to support the campaign, making it pleasantly unavoidable.

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Courtesy HeavyPAC

Bradbury Building with a virtual mural by MOMO, accessed by smartphone

Los Angeles isn't known as a city with great public spaces. It's a city that traditionally has been beholden to private interests, back-room development deals and, of course, the car. Not coincidentally, it's also a city that has been hostile to street art, until it recently began conflating murals with commercial messages and battling multiple billboard lawsuits. As the city slowly begins to course-correct its past mistakes, a new art initiative addresses the intersection of private space and public art -- entirely virtually.

Culture jamming, the tactics used by activists to subvert advertising and other corporate messages, isn't new. It ranges from the Canadian organization Adbusters' attempts to modify corporate billboards to Reclaim the Streets' campaign to "invade" a street and cut it off from cars. Now an organization called HeavyPAC is developing an app to take the intervention to the smartphone.

HeavyPAC's Re*Public project hopes to harness the potential of augmented reality -- a way of combining real-world physical objects with computer-generated aspects such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. Re*Public uses buildings as blank canvases for virtual billboards, applying artistic "skins" onto the outsides of buildings. Users hold the camera on their smartphone up to one of the buildings in the app (to date, there are three), and on the screen they see a mural overlaid on the building.

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Earlier this week, our news blog The Informer reported on ​the Robbins Brothers jewelry store Facebook campaign that lets people use Facebook to post rather bland messages of love to an electronic billboard over the westbound 91 freeway in Corona. It's not known as the most happening part of town, but apparently that freeway is always jammed, so the eight-second long billboard messages will get a good share a viewers.

Of course, the messages, submitted through the store's "Share The Love" page on Facebook are moderated, but how carefully? Can double entendres and naughty imagery slip through the cracks?

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