Wasted opportunity

LOS ANGELES – When people talk about seeing holy signs, they don’t usually mean "Your Ad HERE."

That was the message which appeared Wednesday evening as a 50-foot projected image on the bell tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, headquarters of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese.

Visible to thousands of commuters on a nearby freeway, the sign was gone the next day.

It wasn’t authorized by the archdiocese, spokesman Tod Tamberg said.

"A church tower is different from a billboard. If it wasn’t, we would have been selling ad space 2,000 years ago," he said. "There are plenty of ways to communicate without making ad space out of your sanctuaries. I think most people would react negatively to that."

Turns out, the sign wasn’t really trolling for advertisers. It was a guerrilla art piece by James Cui.

"I’m flattered you noticed," the 28-year-old Highland Park graphic artist told the Los Angeles Times, which called a telephone number listed on the sign.

"I hoped I was hitting a lot of people with it," Cui said. "That’s the trick in L.A. The only way to hit a lot of people is on the freeway."

Cui uses a laptop computer, a video projector and a portable electric generator to cast the images on blank walls.

This was really a wasted opportunity of the signs that could have been placed on the Taj Mahony. Such as perhaps "Ugly Cathedral for sale, Our Lady of Cement Blocks, or Our Lady of the Angles as some have called it. I am sure my readers could come up with a few more.