The artist Jay Shells is at again with a series of street signs that look almost real from the Metropolitan Etiquette Authority. The signs, which aren’t officially sanctioned of course, ask you to watch where you are walking while Facebooking, pull your pants up, and other banes of urbanity. Shells bolts the signs to street poles around New York City, sometimes even in front of policemen, and has been interviewed on several talk shows explaining his “art.”
I am a big fan of etiquette scams. Early in my publishing career when I was at PC Week, I wrote a fake Miss Manners column that posited the notion what if Judith Martin got letters from IT people about proper computing etiquette. It was written in her “Dear Reader” style and was close enough to her prose that we got a cease and desist letter from Martin’s syndicator lawyers.
Shells has done this before, posting signs on New York subways that mimic the graphic style of actual subway service outage notices, again with the idea to improve the quality of life for ordinary riders. He claims 80 signs, using four different messages, have been put up around town. No word on whether this is having any measurable impact on the quality of New York street life yet.
