Artist Says LA Billboard Reproduces His Text Without Permission

LOS ANGELES — Last Friday morning, July 26, artist David Horvitz was strolling around the Sawtelle neighborhood in West Los Angeles, an area with a long Japanese-American history, when he spotted a billboard above a former hardware store with a paragraph of text on it.

After re-reading it several times, Horvitz realized that he himself had written it in 2009 as part of a year-long project that used email and Tumblr to disseminate texts and instructions to his audience, recalling the free-floating art experiments of the Fluxus movement. Although the original Tumblr blog has since evaporated into the internet ether, some of its content has been re-posted elsewhere online and on social media.

“What was it doing on a billboard?” Horvitz wondered. 

What it was doing was promoting 222, a mysterious company that appears to match groups of vetted strangers and bring them together for public experiences. “This is not a dating app,” its website reads. “222 is an opportunity to choose chance … Just say ‘yes’ and explore the chance encounters you’d have never experienced.” (222 has not responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.)

The artist posted about his finding on Instagram, and according to comments, the billboard has been up for over a year; it was still on view as of this article’s publication, as verified by Hyperallergic. Horvitz’s name is not on it.

Horvitz is something of a trickster whose work often plays with ideas around ownership,  appropriation, access, and intellectual property. 

Last year, the estate of the late French artist André Cadere denounced the artist’s decision to mount an unsanctioned exhibition of Cadere’s work in his Los Angeles garden. Horvitz argued that he was simply honoring Cadere’s own subversive methods, which involved bringing his own work to shows of other artists and placing his signature painted wooden bars throughout the urban landscape, well outside a fine art context. 

“You don’t do a Cadere show and ask for permission,” Horvitz said at the time. “You have to do it without permission from the estate. From the gallery. You have to go against those who try to ‘manage’ him. To manage his narrative. You have to go against his codification.” 

Horvitz added another mischievous wrinkle after the show closed, when he printed up cards that read: “Mr. Horvitz has not organized any exhibition of André Cadere or presented any of the artist’s work last week in Los Angeles.”

In 2023, Horvitz created t-shirts printed with the phrase “John Lennon Broke Up Fluxus,” cheekily paying homage to his artistic predecessor Yoko Ono while flipping the misogynistic explanation for the Beatles’s demise on its head. The gallery selling the shirts received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing Yoko Ono and the estate of John Lennon, alleging trademark violation. Horvitz responded by reproducing the lawyers’ letter on another t-shirt.

As for the 222 billboard, Horvitz sees some resonance with the way he incorporates chance and ideas in his practice, albeit with one major difference: “All these things were dumped on the internet, like a bottle in the sea, and they end up somewhere,” Horvitz told Hyperallergic. “This is a commercial company though. If it was another artist doing it, recycling it into an artwork, that’s different, but this is an ad campaign, basically done by me.”

After seeing the billboard, Horvitz posted an open letter to 222 on Instagram: “This morning I saw you used my artwork in your billboard on Sawtelle Boulevard. This artwork has a one-million dollar licensing fee.”

He is awaiting their response.