Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

about street art

Every piece of street art is temporary. It exists on a  wall for a while then disappears. All that remains are photos that circulate the Internet. It is an example of the precarious in art that signifies a transient, uncertain, state  that is in contrast to established or stable ones.  The ephemeral nature of street art  acts to defy or subvert traditional views of  fine art.   

Thankfully, street art is no longer  seen as vandalism of private property.  Its visual creativity, which is   increasingly being  infused with graphic design, is now recognised to have  emerged  from outside the establishment of  the contemporary art institution. 

CDH in Paint Wars: Graffiti v street art  says that there has been an ever widening gap between street art and graffiti; graffiti has remained oppositional while street art has drifted to become the most mainstream contemporary art practice.

This position holds that street art is increasingly populated with artists whose ambitions are to secure good gallery representation, whilst  graffiti culture has no such aspiration.

CDH's argument is that commercial street art heavily trades on the street cred of the outlaw persona that accompanies it, but writing largely paid the price for this credibility. Writers are the ones breaking into train yards and going to prison, while street artists are putting up legal murals or token stencils in back laneways and occasionally having their work buffed. 

CDH adds that:

Today street art finds itself limited to a shrinking territory. It’s being divorced from graffiti culture. Street art still doesn’t have an art theory and it’s often posited as a folk art, so it has limited recognition within the fine arts. The appeals to a mass audience undermine any claim to an avant-garde practice. Therefore, it’s increasingly left with a notoriously fickle mainstream audience of dilettantes.

This argument  for the  different lineage and aspirational destinations for graffiti and street art  both rejects a common and erroneous narrative that tagging evolves into street art and then street art graduates into gallery art and it challenges the  modernist idea of  the opposition of high and low culture.