Outsourced and Upmarket, Sayeg Continues to Cover the World with Yarn (and Newspaper Clippings)

Austin artist Magda Sayeg’s back in the news- the Wall Street Journal profiles the former Houston yarn-bomber turned global celebrity in a short piece in today’s paper. Sayeg’s meteoric rise serves as a case study in a new art-career paradigm: gain notoriety doing something novel and nonthreatening, then sell it to commercial clients looking for notoriety for their businesses. According to the WSJ, Sayeg, who once, as part of the “Knitta, Please” crew, made illicit (though cozy) interventions in the landscape her signature, “rarely does guerrilla work anymore. She now has clients, mostly municipal groups and corporations, and she typically charges anywhere from $25,000 to $70,000 per project.”