Pavement is overrated. The surface, as well as the band, is given far too much credit for laying the groundwork for future technological progress. Surface advancements paved the way, literally, for the intricate web of interstate commerce that terra-formed our country into car addicts. Hurrah! Those of us relegated to two-wheel conveyance in this city know that the pavement we traverse is fickle and unforgiving. I’m not writing this article because I got a flat rear tire today, but expect a corresponding degree of bitterness.

There is a certain appeal to automatic art. The sand that Andre Masson dropped, the words that Tristan Tzara found and the lines that Hugo Ball constructed are pleasing examples of the Daduh aesthetic of chance and uncertainty. Following the logic of these suspects, there is no more automatic art than that created by the automobile. Our city’s streets are an abstract web of cracks, potholes, bumps and fault lines ready to explode my tires.

Anyone with an appreciation for graphic abstraction should take one disgusting second to look beneath their feet at the disposable artistic medium of pavement. The random intricacies created by weather and the thousands of tons of metal, rubber, plastic and glass known as traffic coalesce to form a city-wide participatory exhibit. The recent patch-job done on Bowery is the latest re-canvas-ing of New York’s most genuine street art. In a year’s time the accidental forces of nature will have conspired to create another evolving masterpiece.

This bogus pavement art can, like a lot of modern art, be ugly and annoying, but it is, above all else, reflexive. Crumbling, disposable and unintentional are not only adjectives, they are ways of life in our 21st century. Like the cracks in our environment that splinter off into unanticipated consequences, unchecked maladies in our pavement eventually lead to pothole annihilation.

Riding a bicycle down any New York street is a confrontation. You tend to hate the pavement for not being smoother. The thin-tired among us can feel every last undulation of imperfection that the city has to offer. The slick refinement of the new Bowery is not unlike the expensive development of the new Bowery. The grumbling free-form pavement of Brooklyn’s North Fulton Street echoes the resistant demographics of the area. For all the aggravations that pavement causes the city’s cyclists, they are the only ones that truly get to feel every nuance of this useless art of indiscriminate destruction.

It is easy to feel like the pavement in this city dictates your pace and direction. The truth is, there is a dynamic interplay between the movement and the surface. Sure, the city wouldn’t exist without the pavement, but it doesn’t exist for the pavement, it exists for you. The pavement belongs to you, not the other way around.