But Is It Art?

Just off the Ventura Freeway on Cahuenga Boulevard, beneath the massive claws of a painted dinosaur, a pair of artists are clinging to a scaffold, putting the finishing touches on their nearly 3-D mural of the beast bursting through a wall.

The idea, officials at nearby Universal Studios freely admit, is to promote the entertainment giant’s dino franchise--movies and theme park rides based on the films “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World: Jurassic Park.”

But don’t call it an advertisement. There’s a moratorium on billboards in the area, and the mural, despite its obvious tie-in to Universal, has been approved by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs as a work of art.

Whether it really is artistic or not is, as always, in the eye of the beholder. Some nearby residents are furious, accusing Universal of thumbing its nose at their hard-won moratorium and misrepresenting itself on the mural application. The city, prompted by just such controversies, has begun to look into ways of tightening up the rules.

But more and more, in Los Angeles and other places, the line between art and advertising has become blurred as companies seek more elegant ways to promote themselves.

From artsy Absolut Vodka ads to an Impressionist landscape on a West Valley billboard, art and commerce are working hand-in-glove.

“It’s self-serving to some extent, but we also think it fulfills a function as public art,” Eliot Sekular, spokesman for Universal Studios Hollywood, said of the painted dinosaur. “The marching orders were to come up with a piece of art--that we were not positioning this as advertising.”

Just down Cahuenga Boulevard from the Universal mural is the brightly colored facade of Future Disc Systems, a company that makes master recordings for singers such as Madonna. Bursting out of the front of the building is the company’s signature image: the profile of a head bathed in gold and blue light, with a conch shell at its ear.

Since the mural was painted last year, the site has become something of a landmark, said the company’s owner, Gary Rice. Customers know where the building is, and passersby stop to look.

“I love the business and I’m really proud of it,” Rice said. “And to be able to display an image of what we’ve built is a very proud thing.”

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If a piece is well done, it can even improve the look of ad-cluttered cities and make artistic expression accessible to pedestrians and residents, public-art mavens suggest. Santa Monica, for example, is planning a series of sculptures for its popular Third Street Promenade that will prominently feature the names of companies that donate to the city’s schools.

“There were lots of people--including myself to start with--who were really opposed to the notion of having corporate names anywhere in the public place,” said Bruria Finkel, former chair of the public art committee of the Santa Monica Arts Commission. “But we made sure the artwork was not obnoxious, that it had real merit aesthetically.”

The city of West Hollywood moved a well-known local sculpture to make way for a statue commissioned by the Cuervo tequila company. The piece, by renowned Mexican artist Javier Vazquez, trumpets Cuervo’s name in several places and has generated so much controversy that the city has promised to take it down.

Unlike the Cuervo statue--which lost favor more because neighbors didn’t like the design than because it bore the name of a corporation--the Universal dinosaur has drawn ire specifically because it promotes the entertainment company.

“They’re putting their amusement-park business in our face,” said Joan Luchs, a board member with the North Hollywood Residents Assn.

But not everyone objects to such hybrid works. Some even argue that they brighten dreary urban landscapes and evoke an old, industrial-age tradition of coloring a city by painting eye-catching signs on the sides of buildings.

Subtle, artistic renderings that don’t bombard the viewer with slogans and garish images “give people the benefit of the doubt that they have a brain,” said Richard Lewis, the advertising executive who handles the Absolut campaign at TBWA Chiat/Day in New York. “You don’t have to smack them in the face with it.”

In the case of Absolut, the company was casting about in 1985 for a way to cement its image with an upscale segment of the public, Lewis said. The vodka’s importer at the time, Michel Roux, persuaded Andy Warhol to do a painting that featured an Absolut bottle.

It took off from there, with hundreds of works produced over the years by artists, and more recently, architects. Now the company is planning a new campaign in which authors will write essays in which the vodka plays a part.

“All the art includes our product,” Lewis said. “That is the only requirement.”

The Absolut ads, along with the murals and other works, are a natural extension of corporate sponsorship of art, said Michelle Isenberg, a leading Los Angeles corporate art consultant. The trend is even moving to the Internet, where the Screen Actors Guild recently put together artworks to draw people to its Web page. The line between art and commerce is hazy even at the creative end: Many muralists support themselves with day jobs as billboard painters.

Still, in a society already bombarded by advertising, some worry that we will eventually forget the difference between ads and art.

A company-sponsored piece “can get cloaked as being a nice public artwork, but there’s this other component,” said Maya Emsden, director of the Metro Art program at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “There are underlying philosophical issues that need to be looked at. You can’t just leap into public artwork blindly.”

Indeed, despite Cuervo’s short-lived success in West Hollywood, a corporate image is less likely to find its way into publicly funded art or onto public property because most cities have adopted strict rules regulating civic art projects.

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But on private land, the rules are much less strict. In Los Angeles, a work can be considered a mural--and therefore exempt from zoning ordinances that regulate signs--if less than 3% of it consists of written words. The city’s Cultural Affairs Commission recently approved a mural of a Jeep, even though it was being painted by a sign company and promoted a car, because there are no words on it.

The Universal mural was also easily approved.

“I definitely think they’re blurring the line,” said Rouella Hsieh Louie, director of grants, public art and planning for the Cultural Affairs Department.

“The definition of murals has been very broad and loose,” Louie said. “One of the things our department is working on is to try to tighten it up so that murals are indeed works of art and not . . . commercial advertising.”

Concerned that commerce is outweighing art in too many local murals, both cultural affairs and the department of building and safety are attempting to devise new standards for the paintings, a tricky task because it involves regulating what can be displayed on private property.

Defining a work as a mural--as opposed to a sign--is significant because murals can be huge, while signs are limited in size and location.

Even under the current rules, companies worry that murals bearing their corporate image will be turned down. Universal, for example, relied on a sign company and the owner of the building to apply for permission to paint the dinosaur mural. Universal is leasing the wall from the property owner, Davis & Glick, which does post-production work for the film industry.

“We had no idea it was for Universal,” Louie said. “We were told the owner of the building wanted to put up a dinosaur.”

Not that it would have made a difference had Universal come clean, Louie said. Since there were no words on the mural, it would have been approved anyway.