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A Billboard That Sells Its Own Oddness

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The Daily Pic: Beside the High Line, Elad Lassry becomes a mad Mad Man.

A billboard by Elad Lassry

(Photo by Austin Kennedy, courtesy Friends of the High Line)

This is Elad Lassry’s “Women (065, 055)”, the latest of the billboard art projects organized by (and beside) the High Line park in New York. (The piece came down for a while for a private function, but is now on view again.) Lassry is one of the most interesting photographers working today – if only because it’s so fiendishly hard to figure out what he’s up to, or why it consistently grabs our attention. It must have something to do with how Lassry captures the look of modest commercial photography, with its goal of being perfectly  transparent, and then uses it to the cryptic ends of fine art. The mix is particularly successful in the context of a billboard that shills only for itself.

For a full visual survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

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Blake Gopnik is a contributing critic to Newsweek and The Daily Beast and writes on art and design for a wide range of publications. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of The Washington Post and before that was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University, and has written on aesthetic topics ranging from Facebook to gastronomy.

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