WHEATPASTE MUSIC POSTERS
(or, my pursuits of some of the rarest ephemeral memorabilia in the collecting world)
One of my most beloved hobbies is collecting wheatpaste posters. I love the joyous feeling of preserving them from destruction, so they can live on my wall instead. These posters are destined to be destroyed, from the moment they are printed, and it is very difficult to secure them as a collector, extremely difficult to find them unpasted, and a definite challenge to get them once they are pasted. I currently own 2 unpasted, and 4 pasted.
As a poster collector and general extreme Lady Gaga enthusiast, what better way to show off a true conversation piece than a 6 foot Gaga poster in your living room? I consider them to be the rarest musical memorabilia created, with the exception of signed walls, giant city billboards, and autographed pieces. Good luck getting one of those walls Gaga signed home, affording an authenticated autograph, and that billboard? Bigger than most homes. But that poster down the block, stuck on a thin wall with all the others? That is some middle ground, that is possible. That could be attained.
But God forbid, the right way. So many of my calls to the LA companies that put these posters up have been ignored, deflected, or downright laughed at. Take my money, I say. I want a unpasted poster. You should sell them to fans who want to decorate their home. You are missing a great financial opportunity, Mr. Bigwig, sir. (And on and on.) "Contact the record label or the artist's management," they deflect.
"Contact the flypasting company," the label writes.
A circular passing-the-buck argument leaving me with no giant poster on my walls. A conundrum best solved by taking action into my own boxcutting hands. Not willing to sell me one legally? Ok then. I will stalk your posters and wait until they are trash, and secure it anyway. Thank you very much! (As you can see, I was frustrated.)
Bottom line: You own one of these, it sets you apart from many. The risk is high, the reward is gigantic artistic beauty. 6 feet by 4 feet of the most epic poster you could ever want.
Recently I've made it a point to watch out for areas of Los Angeles where street advertisements like these are ready to be rescued, i.e., falling off the wall, peeling from the weight of older posters, ripped off already to the ground by street crews, etc. My usual criteria is that the release date has to be long past, or they have to be already peeling off the wall so liberation is easy. This way I feel less guilty about removing them. In many cases, it's illegal to put them up in LA anyway, so I am doing the city a favor, and cleaning up for them.
In this case, I'd been stalking a particular set of Hold My Hand posters along Santa Monica Blvd, since May 2022. Every time I drove by it, I'd keep mental tabs on their condition, and gradually, by September, they had been pasted over and the particleboard they were attached to had started to fall off the building. This was my signal to finally act. One day, on the way to Cedars, I saw that the posters had been exposed by a previous layer being ripped off from above them. The fallen particle board had been reaffixed to the building wall improperly, the result being really ugly.
Emboldened by the Gaga posters exposed to the elements, and literally falling apart, I chose to act the day after the Chromatica Ball at Dodger Stadium. Armed with a rental car, 2 friends, a foldable stepladder, an axe, some gloves, and a nice strong FatMax boxcutter, I travelled to Santa Monica Blvd with one thought in mind... liberation.
Unfortunately, it was nightfall by the time I arrived, and the posters were hard to make out in the darkness. The light of my cellphone worked pretty well in conjunction with the streetlamps. I got out of the car and walked around the area, scoping out the posters and checking if there were anymore. There seemed to be a lot trashbags with leaves in them around the alcove of the area. Above, someone had attached the Gaga posters and many others to a roof with a few nails. Amazingly, I didn't need any tools, I just gave the poster a small tug and it all toppled and folded down.
https://youtu.be/dFvaR2SFwcc
I did not realize until I got it safely home, how lucky I got.
There were two posters attached here, and whatever was missing from one seemed to be present on the other side, which means a composite of both could eventually be mounted and framed or at least mounted.
Wheatpaste posters seem to have an unofficial natural lifespan of around 2 weeks:
https://i.ibb.co/V3cykCq/Wheatpaste-flight-length-info.png
to be continued as time permits
