Jet+Rubble’s letter certainly touched
a nerve.  Here’s some of the final emails we received late today. 


From Logan Hicks: “Regarding the jet+rubble dilemma
there are a few things that come to mind with it. First is the claim that it is
‘your’ art. The eyes you do are slapped ‘over’ preexisting images. In
otherwords, the execution of your art is dependent on the existence of
another’s art. The legal argument could be made that New School slapped their
art ‘under’ yours, and the same approach of recontextualizing art was used. With
that said, the moral dilemma is much clearer. They fucked you. The question is
if they knew they were ripping you off. I would send them an invoice for the
amount you feel you were deprived of. Follow up to let them know you sent it,
and confirm they got it. If you bring it to their attention, and they say ‘go
fuck yourself’ then wage war. I totally agree with Otwo and Dirk Digler’s
suggestions. Write to the mags, like beautiful decay, mass appeal, vapors, and
so on, to see if they would be interested in doing a blurb about the corporate
appropriation of urban art culture. if that doesn’t work, send emails to
friends and ask them to email and call on your behalf. call them constantly,
pester them.  if that doesn’t work, then just try and fuck them as much as you
can. go to their offices, and acid etch their car windows. mail them roadkill
(imagine when they open up a box containing rancid, rotting, bloated corpses).
It is my feeling that if you cant win legally, then you should cost them as
much money as you feel the took from you. good luck with things.

/>From J Cannon: “I think it’s more important that people
understand the context that those eyes were used. Don’t judge it from one
frame, or one persons close minded idea of what street art is. In fact those
eyes are on a bus driving through camera, we see them for a few frames. Get over
yourselves. If anyone is making themselve look bad its jet+rubble. As a 20yr.
graffiti vet. if anyone is stealing it’s you. You’re stealing from the graffiti
culture just because its the “cool new thing” maybe kaws,cycle or espo should
sue you. You’ve gotten your 15 minutes and now you want a paycheck.”

/>From J from ZBQ: “We have been unfairly accused of ganking href="http://www.zeroboutique.com/instock/index.php?Design=chetrooper">an
image on your site by urbanmedium. Just wanted to say in our defense that
the image in question was posted on our site (and printed on t-shirts) nearly 2
years ago without any prior knowledge of a similiar image being used by
urbanmedium.  About 5 weeks ago, we were contacted by urban and we agreed to
take the design down off our site. At the time the person I was in contact with
said “don’t worry about it” and seemed to imply that even he wasn’t sure who had
come up with the image first. Now I read on Wooster that we “ganked” his shit
and it makes us look bad. I just wanted to let it be known that we would never
deliberately bite anyone’s stuff. That being said, the image in question is a
juxtapostion of 2 very familiar cultural icons and definitely falls under
“appropriated art”, so to me at least the lines are a little blurry in this
case. I suspect that some other street artist originally came up with this idea
and it was “ganked” by both us and urbanmedium. Whatever the case, it will be
taken down as soon as it’s sold out, mainly because I don’t want such similiar
images on another clothing line. But it doesn’t help to get dissed on Wooster
and have people think we’re all about biting- grow up. As far as that guy trying
to do it through the courts, that’s totally wack. True originality will always
shine through, so don’t even sweat it. - href="http://www.zeroboutique.com">Jason