Laser 3.14

There is a tagger in Amsterdam that signs his work with “Laser 3.14”. His tags are short snippets of text, usually in English, that feel like they’re meant to be provocative but generally are as deep as a typical office coffee mug.

When we first moved here, I thought they were cute enough, but eventually they started to get on my nerves the way Successories posters might. And rather than just fading away as one might expect, somehow he has gained credence as an Artist, with renderings of his tags being laser-cut into acrylic signs and hung on the walls of ad agencies and coworking spaces to make them, you know, edgy. There’s also at least one Italian restaurant that commissioned him to paint a sign to point tourists their way.

It’s as if a teenager learned that Lawrence Weiner got famous with “just word” and somehow found an audience that had been wondering “what if Banksy, but without the visual art or meaningful social commentary?”

Anyway, I think he’ll be very successful if he decides to do NFTs.