http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/nyregion/13stuffed.html?hp&ex=1131944400&en=79ca47853b5dae76&ei=5094&partner=homepage

What interests me most is that the NYC Department of Sanitation has an Artist-in-Residence.

An interesting read, but once we got to:



I went back to Occam's Razor - these guys like decorating their vehicles.

I remembered my trip to Malta, where the wonderful old buses with rock hard suspension are highly decorated with religious symbolism on and around the dashboard. I tried to find some images on the web, but in the 100's of examples on Google, not one is of this interior decoration; the Anglo-Saxon bus-spotters who take the photos are only interested in the exteriors of the buses: make and model number etc. A classic example of a cultural phenomenon and the observers reinterpreting it according to their own paradigm.

If buses in Malta are anything like buses in New York, I'd decorate them with every religious symbol I could find...at least before riding them.

Well, some people are overly academic and will analyze art -- and this is art, albeit unconventional art -- to death.

What I find interesting is the implied snobbery; if a dancer or a lighting designer (or a banker or a lawyer) were to do the same thing, it would draw little comment, if any, but since the people involved drive trucks -- and garbage trucks, at that -- they are presumed to be without art.