Last Wednesday night, the gallery was packed with downtowners -- dressed-for-the-office young women with pierced eyebrows, a guy bustling around with a Starbucks sticker on his head apropos of, um, some statement -- viewing more than 1,000 adulterations of outdoor signage by the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF), Cicada, Ron English and other practitioners of "culture jamming," put up temporarily and photographed for posterity. (Those unable to catch the show, through May 21, can find many works at the BLF home page -- which, fair warning, includes one of the most irritating audio files on the Internet.)

The timing couldn't have been better, considering that not two weeks earlier, cigarette billboards from coast to coast were replaced with anti-smoking ads as part of the state tobacco settlement, effecting perhaps the country's largest act of billboard liberation -- and depriving these very artists of their favorite targets. (The exhibit is riddled with Joe Camel desecrations -- Joe as a dinosaur, Joe in a coffin, etc.) Or it couldn't have been worse, for the same reason. With the Marlboro Man supplanted by state-sponsored adbusting, with ad alteration becoming an-ever-more-popular amateur pastime, with Conceptual artist Barbara Kruger having done ads for the Economist, what's a culture jammer to do nowadays?

In 1977 the Billboard Liberation Front in San Francisco performed the first of what it calls billboard "improvements" on a Max Factor ad, changing the billboard slogan "A pretty face isn't safe in this city. Fight back with Self-Defense" to "Fight crap with Self-Respect" and "Fight back with Self-Abuse." Over the years the group -- which doesn't espouse a political agenda so much as a playful humor and the belief that "everyone should have their own billboard" -- refined its methods, crafting elegant overlays to plaster on signs at night, and later moving on to electric signage. (In a gesture of solidarity, the BLF leaves behind 12-packs of beer for the billboard workers who clean up after them.)

If you read alternative weeklies, you know where it goes from here. Other groups and guerrilla artists began making raids across the country, some heavy-handed ("New World Order" over Picasso's "Guernica"), some whimsical ("Masturbation Is Murder"). By the '90s, articles on billboard pranksters -- the artist stealing out at midnight, the quote about the "commercially-induced 'American Dream,'" the flustered response from some middle-management advertising straw man -- were as reliable an alternative-rag fixture as "Life in Hell" and the top ten censored stories report.

Billboards, as BLF notes, are probably the only major medium created for and dedicated to advertising; and billboard alteration is a distinctively American art/protest form, equal parts Jenny Holzer and Ogden Nash. Outdoor ads are ubiquitous, often invasive, and they're also our own public art, our capitalist frescoes; the artists here found a way to make relevant, accessible art by turning a massive monologue into a conversation.

A good billboard alteration is jarring, creepily hilarious ("If you're looking for a sign from God, here it is. Kill yourself"). A great one can be thought-provoking, even beautiful: A Smokey the Bear ad with a giant lit match becomes a haunting memorial to the Los Angeles riot: "Amber Waves of Flame: LA '92." The worst are sophomoric or drip contempt for all those brainwashed robots filling their big suburban houses with crap: "WARNING: Sabotaged propaganda may be dangerous to apathetic minds." (Does my art shock you, sheep?) It's an attitude that -- surprise -- cropped up in some of the CBGB audience. "They could only get away with this in New York City," a man purred to his date. "In Kansas they'd get arrested."

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