Whereas, in said U.S. of A., the billboards are already being cleared away, Europe is busily erecting its own as proof that it has entered modernity and that the continent's final reconstruction can begin, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The billboard as a frozen image is a Renaissance atavism. It simulates vitality by feeding on the principles of perspectivist illusion, whose center is the eye. By detaching advertisements from their commodity setting, the ironicist Warhol of the early 1960's turned ads, whose function was to transmit consumptive messages, into two-dimensional objects that required no fixed viewpoint. Now that was modern art.
Urban advertising follows a similar trajectory, but in the opposite direction.
Thirty years after Warhol, the European billboard appears as a senseless, detached message, but does so in order to make renewed appeals to the passerby as consumer. The intelligibility of such signposting does not result from its information value, but from its design's capacity to function as a lifestyle mirror for the city and its users. Billboards owe their existence to the third dimension that appears when they catch eyes and become part of a meaningful identity d cor. Because stylized advertising stays in the place where future consumers will be born, it will never become modern art. The billboard has always been part of the public picture, deriving its effect from the slowness of the passing masses.