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.