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A story in the paper today about “The Splasher,” a mysterious figure who runs around flinging splashes of paint at street art. It’s all a little bit ridiculous.

First, “the crime”: if you’re painting something illegally on the street, how angry can you get when someone puts paint on top of it? What’s the scandal here? Isn’t part of the point of “street art” the ephemeral and informal nature of the encounter, and the ease with which it’s overwritten? It just goes to show you how crazy the art world has become, when anti-institutional vernacular art forms are adopted by galleries and museums to represent the cadre of “outsider” artists.

Next, “the criminals”: if those writing and distributing the Splasher Manifesto are really those responsible for the act, the whole thing is a big charade. To attack the commercialization of street art through the very channels of that commercialization–institutions in general, and the media fuss over the Chelsea art scene in particular–isn’t daring or ingenious. It’s a transparent ploy to become the next star of the art market. My favorite part is the opening of the Splasher Manifesto, which is one of the more hilarious acts of self-damnation to come out of the art world in a while:

In New York City, during the summer of 2006, a group of co-conspirators and provocateurs began a program that confronted a cultural realm which revealed a content of commodity recuperation behind the facade of pseudo opposition. By challenging what the experts term “street art,” our actions have, in turn, uncovered an alliance between the coercive force of the state and the “creative class” of the artist.

No way! You mean so-called rebellious art is actually insufferably high brow?! Truly astonishing. The joke is that these “provocateurs” are so ignorant of the impression they make, which they’ve clearly spent so long crafting. The manifesto reads like a press release by some exhausted critical poseur. It’s an attempt by the collective to write themselves into the very history they claim they’re rebelling against. A “content of commodity recuperation behind the facade of pseudo opposition”? Most of us would just say “load of shit,” except that wouldn’t do as much to ingratiate us to the arbiters we’re purporting to attack. The decision to disseminate titled literature declaring rebellion is all firmly grounded in canonical art history, the proliferation of manifestos in the Modernist period in particular. Note how the press immediately picked up on the fact and called the pamphlet (technically titled “if we did it, this is how it would’ve happened”…note the anti-establishment avoidance of uppercase letters) “The Splasher Manifesto.” The manifesto’s reference to Surrealism is almost offensively gratuitous.

Maybe this manifesto isn’t the work of the real Splasher. Maybe it’ll turn out to be a kind of trick in itself, a sort of performance piece about the popular posture of rebellion in the art world. Even in that best-case scenario, I’m more dizzy than amused.

It’s a shame, because this whole splasher story had a lot of potential. It would have been far more intriguing if the splasher had been either an honest vandal–a species that long ago went extinct in the art world–or a really orthodox conservative, someone offended by the admission of street art into the charmed space of the gallery. Instead, The Splasher collective seems to be promising us just what they claim to be rebelling against: “the certainty of dying of boredom.”