http://www.nypress.com/article-20077-busted_.html   Here is the link to the article written in the NY Press about the silkscreen T-shirts created by Vanessa Bucci AKA Blue Tape Crew The Article is pasted below if you are to lazy to click on the link thanks!

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WE LIVE IN an era of unrivaled design choices. Due to technological advances, graphic artists can now easily market and sell their work, reaching an audience inconceivable just a few years ago. Those who like to prove their individuality by wearing it can buy original works printed or silkscreened on T-shirts online, at chain stores or off a folding table on the street. Wait. That’s where things get tricky.

While big-box retailers such as the Virgin Megastore and Circuit City have recently shuttered, Union Square remains the ideal marketplace for the do-it-yourself entrepreneur, and dozens of people can be found at various points throughout the day hocking their wares. A perfect place to sell some T-shirts with original designs by a young local artist. At least that’s what Vanessa Bucci thought. A slender young brunette often clad in the clothing she makes, Bucci was selling her silkscreened T-shirts on a table located alongside Union Square West when a police officer approached her and gave her a ticket for “vending apparel without a parks permit.”

“He just said, ‘You can’t sell these kinds of shirts here,’ threw them in a bag and walked away,” explains Bucci, referring to NYPD Officer Omar Malcolm. “He’s been harassing me since ‘07, but I’ve never had anything taken away before. I think it’s because he was flirting with one of my friends, and she was ignoring him.”

Bucci eventually got her shirts back and the ticket thrown out because, as she later learned, she hadn’t really violated a law.

The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs requires a general vending license for the sale of crafts—which includes jewelry, leather goods and clothing. These permits are in short supply and are awarded to veterans (for free) and to 853 petitioners a year at costs that can reach into the thousands. Thanks to the First Amendment books, T- shirts and pins bearing political messages and original visual art are protected from vendor license requirements.

Bucci and other graphic designers regard their work as original art, but printed clothing falls into a legal gray area thanks to a 2004 court case, Mastrovincenzo v. the City of New York, that debated the artistic merit of graffiti-painted clothes. The outcome set a precedent: While these painted clothes did not require permits, since they had a “predominantly expressive purpose,” generally the sale of painted clothing “is not necessarily expressive,” and simply a method to avoid the laws regarding permits, leaving each subsequent case to individual scrutiny by police and the judicial system.

Ironically, Bucci began by selling her designs as wall-mountable prints. People liked the designs but few would actually commit to purchasing them. By switching to T-shirts, Bucci’s sales increased exponentially.

And that’s why we are the hypocrites. We congratulate struggling local designers and appreciate the expression of their art, however, the moment one turns a profit from their efforts, we call them a “sell-out” and question the sincerity of their artistic expression. Nobody is safe from being the person who is “just trying to sell another T-shirt.”

“T-SHIRTS ARE THE most common form of cottage industry,” says School of Visual Arts professor Steven Heller, explaining why graphic artists turn toward apparel to promote their artwork. A specialist in the history of illustration and graphic design, Heller is also the co-author of The Design Entrepreneur: Turning Graphic Design Into Goods That Sell. “They are fairly easy to produce, but ideas are precious,” he explains. “It all depends on whether the image or message touches a chord.”

Americans spend close to $2 billion annually on shirts, according to a 2002 Economic Census study, and more and more people want to get in on that action.

Jason Laurits is a Brooklyn-based designer who works full-time on his “Paste” clothing line of silkscreened shirts. He often sells his clothing at the Young Designers Market in Soho. Although at first glance he blends in with the many young designers across New York, hawking his wares from a table on the weekends, Laurits’ designs are quirky and clever: one newer shirt celebrates New York City, featuring a Swiss Army knife with the regular tools replaced by images of the Chrysler building and a pigeon. Another design uses an antique advertisement of a woman wearing a bustle and a man in a top hat, saying, “Damn girl.”

Laurits sees his own success as coinciding with the “arms race of who could get the coolest graphic T-shirt.” He noted this trend over the past decade among young creative types—and he was in the right place at the right time when he started silk-screening. The “Damn girl” T-shirt is no longer on his sales table since, he shyly admits, Bloomingdale's began selling it in its stores, along with several of his other original designs. “I didn’t want to annoy the buyer,” Laurits says.

Insisting on working only in creative fields, Laurits began the T-shirt business after attempting a singing career in London. After he screen-printed one of his concert posters on a shirt for a friend, and it turned out to be popular, he began printing-by-hand multiple shirts.

“But now I really question myself!” he says in relation recent success with Bloomingdales. “Am I no longer the ‘local Brooklyn designer’ because I ‘sold out’? Isn’t sponsorship every artist’s dream?”

Laurits’ success now allows him to farm out the hand-printing to an independent studio. He spends his time taking care of the business and working on designs—often repurposing old photographs and other images to create his signature “not-so-artsy and not-so-serious” approach. He feels this edge makes his shirts unique and competitive.

In “balancing business with art,” as he calls it, Laurits admits to creating images that he wasn’t particularly married to because he knew they would sell—allowing him to produce less popular shirts with designs he really loved.

ARTISTS SERIOUS ABOUT selling graphic T-shirts in New York usually silkscreen their designs themselves. The hand-powered process—time consuming but relatively inexpensive—makes designs that are perfectly stained into the cotton, leaving none of the rough textures of an iron-on transfer or direct-ink printing. Every designer I spoke with for this article insisted that it was the only way to produce high-quality graphic prints, and most referred to the craft as an “art in itself.”

Jackson Vandeberg, a lanky 26-year-old, is a freelance graphic designer who grew up on the Lower East Side. He creates shirts at ABC No Rio, an artists’ community center in his neighborhood, and experiments with color and texture by mixing together different shades of ink each time he creates a one-of-akind shirt. This process sets him apart from some of the other artists the studio hosts, most of whom reproduce the same images and colors multiple times.

During a visit to ABC No Rio, I watched Vandeberg print a stylized graphic of his own design depicting various Lower East Side landmarks.

First, a fine mesh screen is prepared as a stencil: a rubbery, light-sensitive emulsion is spread over the mesh so that, once dried, an image can be burned in a process similar to photographic film. The emulsion washes away wherever strong fluorescent lights have hit the chemical, creating a stencil of the often-intricate images.

Pouring different colored inks over his screen, Vandeberg used a sort of hard-edged squeegee to push the inks through the stencil onto a white T-shirt. Because he mixes different colors each time, it takes him at least 30 minutes to complete a single shirt. His resulting color patterns would be hard to reproduce using a computer: the vibrant reds and yellows or teal and magenta streak across the designs as though viewing an artist’s palette through the lens of Vandeberg’s graphic art.

He sells some of his T-shirts at Reciprocal Skateboards on East 11th Street and uses the income to buy new materials. “For me, it’s just an excuse to get away from the computer, relax and do something unique,” Vandeberg explained.

Running the ABC No Rio print shop is Garry Boake, a punk rock-outfitted, multi-pierced guy in his forties, with a studded leather patch over his right eye. Boake has been screening T-shirts since 1982 and got started by making and selling bootleg concert shirts for $5 outside of Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa and Missing Persons shows, among others. The Long Island–based artist works at ABC No Rio out of love. “Silk-screening is fun,” he said. “We try to avoid the perfect lines of graphic printouts; those look so sterile. Also, you have much more control over the texture of your shirt art with screening—iron-on transfers just don’t have the same quality.”

The other printers watch attentively as Boake pours emulsion over an empty mesh screen and smoothes it out using the plastic squeegee.

“This drawing took me four months to create,” Boake explained when asked about the art of silk-screening. He points to the intricate dragon that has been delicately printed in white onto his black T-shirt. “But getting white on black like this really requires a lot of precision and patience.”

BUCCI NO LONGER sells her work in Union Square. She received three summonses since 2007, the judges throwing out the tickets each time, and she was fed up the NYPD harassment. Now her clothing and bags—silk-screened with abstract renderings of photographed industrial architecture and electrical equipment—sell in Live Fast!, a store in the Lower East Side owned by designer Cecelia Anton.

Anton seeks to clothe people with highly individual style and is thrilled to sponsor someone like Bucci. “We were one of the first stores to carry Ed Hardy,” Anton says boastfully, referring to the tattoo artist’s designs bedazzled on T-shirts seen from Staten Island to San Diego. Because of his subsequent popularity (and uncool status), Anton no longer carries the designer at her store.

Although Bucci wants to make a living from her design work, by no means does she intend to change her artwork to appeal to a mass audience, she says. In this way, she is a good fit at Live Fast!, as the store’s concept is a highly individualized style. “Sure, I want to be successful, who doesn’t?” she says. “But I don’t want meatheads to wear my stuff.”

But plenty of others still attempt to sell apparel on the city streets on any given day. I spoke to one artist in Union Square, a Ukrainian native who didn’t want his name used, who sells colorful and intricately silkscreened blouses affixed with stickers that read NO WAR and PEACE.

He claims some buyers may keep these “decorations,” others might remove the stickers at their discretion, eventually admitting that it’s a “minor protection” against police harassment. He has also been fined and appeared in court over his vending. A few yards away, another vendor who refused to be named also spoke of tickets and court visits after selling his hand-painted clothing.

“[The judge] said, ‘This is your artwork!’ and threw the case out,” he explains. Now he paints WORLD PEACE along the lower-back of the shirts. “This way, it’s extra protection against getting any tickets.” Both artists make use of the loophole in which T-shirts of a “political nature” require no vendor’s permit. None of the vendors with tables full of Obama pins and shirts would comment beyond saying that the police don’t bother them and their business, which one described as going “good.”

Robert Lederman is an artist and president of the advocacy group A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics). He finds the current state of vending laws to be an embarrassment. Despite fighting in major legal battles, winning six federal cases in favor of vendors, Lederman claims that the complex laws, inconsistent interpretation by judges and “each of the 40,000 NYPD officers” make selling work on the street tough for artists.

“Even the legislators who wrote [the laws] can’t understand them and complain about it publicly,” he insists. “There’s no consistency on how one judge is going to rule versus another, and as for what’s considered political, that’s totally objective—you could make anything up and say it’s political, from a piece of shit to an ice cream cone or a rainbow.”

Mastrovincenzo v. the City of New York has never been appealed, so street artists are entirely under the whim and scrutiny of individual judges and police officers. Additionally, although the law protects prints as artwork, it never stipulates what materials are appropriate for printing—by taking a T- shirt, and mounting it in a frame, one could effectively bypass the law.