Now, a Mural From Our Sponsor

As seamlessly as it mixes fantasy with reality, Universal Studios has mixed art with advertising on the wall of a Cahuenga Boulevard building. But the mural of a dinosaur--an obvious plug for the entertainment company’s “Jurassic Park” franchise--upsets some neighbors who see the painting as little more than a dino-sized ad.

It’s a tricky question these days: When is art really advertising?

Taken in isolation, the dinosaur mural could be written off as a kitschy bit of color on an otherwise drab stretch of shops and film-production houses. The ruckus over rex stems in part from a sense that every public fixture from bus benches to buses themselves carries some sort of corporate message, that advertising is everywhere. Neighbors complain that Universal made an end run around city restrictions on billboard advertising by applying for an easy-to-get mural permit instead.

The line between art and commerce has always been thin. In recent years, the difference has become almost indistinguishable. Many cities require developers to pony up a percentage of building costs for public art projects. Major corporations underwrite concerts. Arias sell sport utility vehicles. And of course, some ad copy is better than most novels.

More and more often, commercial enterprises assume roles traditionally held by the public sector. Residents tired of ballooning costs have suggested privatizing everything from trash collection to the Los Angeles International Airport. Thousands of schoolchildren are informed of current events by a satellite service that hawks blue jeans and video games. When art is privatized, the image is often as unambiguous as the Tyrannosaurus on Cahuenga.

Concerned that commerce is dominating public art, Los Angeles cultural-affairs and building-and-safety officials want to devise new guidelines for displays such as murals. They should tread lightly and beware of trampling rights of free expression. As it stands, a work can be considered a mural--and exempt from restrictive sign regulations--if less than 3% of it contains written words. That’s pretty restrictive. Intuition suggests banning blatant representations of identifiable products, such as an ice-cold bottle of Pepsi. That’s obviously advertising, right? But what about a painting of a can of Campbell’s soup?