• New York, Very Short List, The New York Times , Wednesday, October 8, 2008 10:02 AM

The subhed to a New York magazine story about a guy who cuts and pastes subway-advertising posters to create political art says it all: "One man's vandalism is another's political art. Just ask Poster Boy, the Matisse of subway-ad mash-ups." Of course, they've been saying something like that since the days of TAKI 183's singular graffito.

Poster Boy, on the other hand, mixes and matches elements for different ads. The Iron Man logo in one ad, for example, was transformed into "IRAN=NAM." A NYPD recruitment-drive poster was transmogrified to read: "MY NYPD KILLED SEAN BELL." Subway workers are much quicker to remove the transmogrifications than they were to whitewash TAKI, but Poster Boy has a decided technological advantage to spreading his message .

Very Short List reports that more people would rather have the Harley Davidson logo tattooed on their leg than any other brand. The No. 2 and No. 3 brands in the poll conducted by Millward Brown -- Disney and Coke -- project a different cachet altogether. The article also contains a link to a fun history tracing the evolution of well-known logos.

An exhibit of tobacco advertising from the 1920s through the 1950s opens today at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library at Madison Avenue and 34th St. It's titled "Not a Cough in a Carload: Images Used by Tobacco Companies to Hide the Hazards of Smoking."

The first part of the title is borrowed from a slogan for Old Gold cigarettes, a brand that subsequently boasted in its ads of being "made by tobacco men, not medicine men," Stuart Elliott reports. The exhibit can also be viewed online .

A theme that runs throughout the advertising, according to Dr. Robert K. Jackler of the Stanford School of Medicine, is "the intent is to turn youth, ages 12 to 22, into youthful smokers."

The ads seem to blow smoke in the face of tobacco marketers who have ardently maintained that their only goal was to get smokers to change brands .

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