Shark jumping

Has the Providence underground art scene jumped the shark? Last year's media blitz on "The Apartment at Providence Place Mall," in which a group of artists "micro-developed" abandoned, neglected mall storage space into a furnished flat, brought CBS and Fox News to town and generated headlines worldwide. It was the latest salvo in a barrage of underground art strikes bringing attention to the capital. Providence first gained international buzz in the late 1980s when former RISD student Shepard Fairey created stickers that said "Obey" and "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" and stuck them on lampposts and Dumpsters throughout the city. Ten years ago, more people in Helsinki and Stockholm knew about the street art/pulp comic/noise punk scene happening on the West Side of Providence than people living on the East Side. (The Fort Thunder era of the mid-1990s was recorded for Rhode Islanders in the acclaimed RISD exhibition of street posters and giant installations, "Wunderground Providence: 1995 to the Present.")

Now television executives have floated the idea of re-staging the "Apartment at the Mall" project for a reality TV show in Manhattan. And all of those Andre the Giant faces that sprang up on stop signs and bulletin board kiosks can be purchased at Urban Outfitters. (There's even a store on the formerly sticker-plastered Thayer Street in the heart of the Brown University community.) Proving once again the adage that all successful subversion eventually mutates into commodity.