Unstuck

As long as we’re talking about things being defaced, herewith a meaningless update.

Some folks might remember a post from back in February wherein I disclosed the details of a frankly ridiculous experiment in which I had a bunch of stickers printed and went around slapping them up in likely spots around downtown Manhattan. My aim was not necessarily to achieve any particular notoriety in street-art sticker circles, but rather to see if I could leave a lasting mark, so to speak, and have my stickers ideally stay put. I had an initial run of 300 stickers printed up and pretty much stuck them all up out there. As a lark, I had a secondary run of stickers — same dumb design but smaller, but with a sort of holographic finish — printed up, but never had much time to stick up many of those.

As I mentioned in that first post, I effectively disseminated my first run of stickers around neighborhoods more, shall we say, “susceptible” to such things. In many instances, certain stickers I’d placed barely lasted a week. For any number of possible reasons, certain spots were just harder to sustain than others, whether because of competition (for want of a better term), diligent sanitation or, y’know, maybe “haters” like this guy. After a while, though, I got reasonably crafty about my application, and managed to cover a lot of turf.

Then, of course, the pandemic arrived, and life as we knew it came to a grinding halt.

Unbelievably, it’s been about five months since then. This past weekend, I had some time on my hands, so I went out for a long walk downtown, trying to remember some of the spots where I’d put up my silly stickers. A lot has changed in the city writ large, so I was wondering if that had trickled down to the granular sticker level.

As it turns out, despite my lofty aspirations to still be able to see my stickers affixed to furtive spots “five or six years from now,” I am bemused to report that, well, only about 25% of them can still be spotted where I stuck them. Most were simply pulled down, peeled off, covered over or scratched out. A couple were amusingly defaced — my favorite being the one around NYU that featured the word “Pablum” crossed out with “Scrotum” written in its place. By and large, though, most of them were just plain ol' gone.

That said, there are several still out there, some surprisingly in comparatively prominent locations. While I still have a many of the secondary run, I’m not sure i’m going to go to any great lengths to put those up just yet.

None of this matters.