Arrest
In December 1999 Powers was arrested at his home for graffiti vandalism after he had participated in a protest conceived by multimedia artist Joey Skaggs. The protest was against Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's attempt to shut down the controversial art show "Sensation" at the Brooklyn Museum. Powers contends that the arrest was politically motivated. A New York Times editorial criticized the Giuliani administration for its secrecy in the case, but dismissed Powers as "a noodge and self-promoter, one of those deliberately annoying characters whom most of us could do without." The Village Voice sympathized with ESPO’s plight saying “it's truly scary to think that if you invite people to throw artificial dung at a portrait of the mayor—especially one that resembles the infamous Madonna, packing them in at the Brooklyn Museum—the police will raid your apartment. And if they spot a set of brass knuckles hanging on the kitchen wall, they will bust you for possessing a weapon.” However, the author was also critical of Power’s graffiti status, describing him as an egotistical, careerist "celebrity offender"; the author writes, "in the graffiti world...many consider Powers a media-fed simulation of the Real Thing." Powers was charged with six counts of criminal mischief and he eventually accepted a plea bargain and performed five days of community service.
Read more about this topic: Steve Powers (artist)
Famous quotes containing the word arrest:
“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me,
Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
By cursed Cain’s race invented be,
And blest Seth vexed us with Astronomie.”
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“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)