less.. Using military colors, they went on to create a multi-hued Chetrooper series styled after Andy Warhol's silk-screen "Marilyn" paintings. Soon they were receiving e-mail messages from people in Japan and Australia who had spotted Chetrooper on telephone poles in Kyoto or Melbourne. A phenomenon was born. "Once we started pasting and sticking the image," Mr. Fridman said, "it took on a life of its own."

Inspired by graffiti, posters and the communal culture of the Web, stickers are gaining wide attention as an artistic phenomenon, academics and practitioners say. Hand-drawn, stenciled or screen-printed, the images float on the Internet, available for downloading, printing and pasting in ways that the creators could only have imagined. And as they make their way around the globe, from one e-mail in-box to the next, one cultural context to another, their meaning tends to morph.

Now that broadband users can send large graphics files in an instant, stickers are a very fast-moving medium. A sticker can be created Monday morning in New York, e-mailed to a stranger in Paris and affixed to the back of a trash receptacle on the Champs-Élysées in the early afternoon.

"It works particularly well in walking cities," said Alice Twemlow, who organizes shows about visual culture as program director at the American Institute of Graphic Arts. "Walking brings intimate encounters with the stickers that could not be experienced while driving. There is also an immediacy with which people can respond."

Scott Rettberg, a scholar in new media, attributes the resurgence of stickers to low-cost inkjet printers and "the ubiquity of the global network." "Cheap printers give artists the ability to mass-produce work intended for public consumption," he said, "and stickers are easier to place than traditional graffiti."

Many sticker artists cite the mainstreaming of skateboard culture as a turning point in their movement. "Kids want to have cool high-quality stickers, especially more subversive ones from underground artists," said Zarathustra James, who runs the sticker site www.bomit.com. "They'll actually fistfight for free stickers at skate demos."

Initially skateboarders used them to decorate the bottoms of their skate decks, but eventually they made their way onto more visible urban signposts. "If there is a graffiti tag or sticker or stencil on that electrical box/pole/sign, it looks more aesthetically pleasing than the plain box," Mr. James said by e-mail. "And it makes you think."

Because the stickers are exposed to the elements as well as to sanitation crews, Web sites have sprung up with the goal of simply documenting a transient art form. In 2002, Marc and Sara Schiller of Manhattan founded www.woostercollective.com, a site dedicated to street art.

"There was a real great need for artists who are putting art on the street to connect with each other," Ms. Schiller said. "The site offers everyone the ability to cross continents, ages, generations."

Many sticker artists trace the origins of the current movement to Shepard Fairey, who created a sticker of Andre the Giant, the professional wrestling star, in the early 1990's and posted it at the Web site www.obeygiant.com. Soon he was shipping the stickers to people all over the world. What began as a prank to market something that had no meaning led many people to rethink the potential of such images.

Colby Woodland, who exhibits street art at www.20mg.com, describes stickering as a form of "visual narcotics." But whereas "the media's bombardment of images is intended to make you feel and act a certain way," he said, "stickering can confront the viewer in situations when they least expect it." Most of his stickers are subversive in that they seek to create an awareness of the dulling effect that the conventional mass media have on the senses.

Paul Burgess of Brighton, England, who photographs stickers on the street and posts them at www.streetstickers.co.uk, agreed that the art could be visually addictive. "You develop a kind of `sticker sense,' " he said, "and you spot more and more."


A picture caption on Page 34 of Arts & Leisure today with an article about stickers as an art form reverses the names of two examples. The one at top left is "Bullseye"; the one at its right is "Salesman." Two credits are also reversed. The picture at the top left is by Marc and Sara Schiller; the one at the bottom left is by Jeff Sharman.