This devalues terrorism. We’ve now moved to the point where colored lights can shut down a major city. This is an untenable position. I think the terrorists have won.

And just to put the terrorism spiel into perspective a bit, the first LED authorities found was planted underneath a major highway and above a T station that doesn’t exactly see heavy traffic. Not a good place for an advertisement, but not a bad place for a bomb.

What gets me is that they got arrested AFTER Turner owned up. At least one of them is to be arraigned tomorrow morning. Somehow I don’t think Turner’s lawyers are doing a thing to get them out earlier. There’s a $100K bail set on my friend’s head.

These guys are good artists; they’ve been exhibiting all around Boston and New York and the Nevada desert. The whole thing is so ridiculous that it would be funny if not for the knee-jerk reactions to art in the last few years. As it stands, who knows?

This incident really is pretty disturbing, I’ve come to realize. If it were just art that looked like terrorism, as in the previous cases that I linked to, so what? There’s only a tiny amount of art to scare us, and we can just lock up the artists or help them learn to police their own artistic practices.

But these devices weren’t art, they were advertising, as Turner has now admitted. Imagine that you can’t tell the difference between advertising and terrorism. Now imagine New Years Eve in Times Square. I think you see the problem.