Ad-free Christmas

Sao Paulo got an unusual Christmas present last year --- or maybe it was an "un-present." South America's largest city, at 11 million "consumers" (that's what citizens are to marketers) went advertising-free as the result of a scorched-earth ban on everything from billboards to posters to ads on buses and taxis and trains.

One man's triumph of aesthetics over "visual pollution" is another man's freedom-of-expression violation, so there have been the predictable challenges by the Brazilian Association of Advertises, which calls the new statute "fascist." More creative, grasping-at-straws objections include the arguments that (a) advertising is an art form, (b) consumers will be deprived of valuable product information, (c) part of Brazilian culture will be lost with the extinction of the distinctive vernacular of Sao Paulo signage, (d) Mayor Gilberto Kassab would do better to ameliorate the eyesore of city homelessness.

I'll say one thing in favor or the old skyscraper-sized billboards, many of which make New York's "Times Square" look like a kid's lemonade stand for size: they concealed some downright uninspired architecture, whose removal makes the place look like a homely woman with her make-up off. Still, if I have to choose, I'll take the new bleak gray concrete vista over the in-your-face, thong-clad seductress. But when their city councilman speaks sanguinely about the goal of a "complete change of culture," I say lots of luck.