Your Advertisements Beautify Our City

In an effort to kick-start consumer culture in Moscow after the collapse of Communism, billboards with the above slogan appeared around the city. That culture, now revving full throttle thanks to oil, is responsible for one of the most thoroughgoing urban dye jobs since neon hit Las Vegas. Walk just 20 feet in the center of Moscow and you’re bombarded with a profusion of brash reds and yellows and blues, hawking everything from Ocean’s Thirteen to Garnier anti-cellulite cream. In fact, walk just 20 feet anywhere in Moscow and you WILL see this billboard for Garnier anti-cellulite cream:

Now we could debate whether this constitutes “beautifying” what was once a comparatively drab palette. Indeed, as some Russians argue, there is a middle ground between gray and garish and you don’t have to explode the visible spectrum up and down every boulevard to sell products. Though even gray can be garish, especially when you use it to build an impossibly large Peter the Great depicted inexplicably as a seafaring Roman soldier. By some accounts, residents of the city wish he would simply sail away:

Of course, underneath it all, Russia has a long tradition of smart, eye-popping color, made the more dazzling by its neutral canvas. It’s this tradition that makes Moscow a truly beautiful city. But don’t believe me. Its advertisements say so: