Ahaugen, if you delete this Street Art thread....

[Laemkral]

I will come to Canada and kick your butt. This is the fourth try at this.

"Exit Through the Gift Shop" is a film about street art, by a street artist known to the world as Banksy. I recently saw it, and I have to say that I was really impressed. I was exposed to street art on a tour of Berlin last year, where it is just about everywhere in the city.

Since I'm posting from my iPad, I'll put up a more thorough analysis later. For now, i want to hear people's thoughts on street art, the movie if they saw it, or whatever else you might have to say on the subject.

[Laemkral]

Alright, time for a proper post from me. I have to say that I am fascinated with street art, though it's a fascination in passing. I think the idea is a very good one, as art is not something you can ever define. So, why cant graffiti be art? In Berlin I saw everything from simple stencils, stickers, posters, to entire grand murals. I think that it takes the idea of the mural and places a new modern twist on it.

I like that for many of the artists, they quite literally see the world as their canvas. That a blank, boring wall is just a revolting idea and that they just have a need to put art there. I like that other artists use their art to express outrage with society. I think that the subculture it has created is a very good one that helps redefine modern art.

Of course, i also understand the desires of modern society to shut them down because at the core of it they are defacing private property. For some of the artists, this is a part of the art, the knowledge that their creation will be short lived and probably gone within a week. Compared to the timeless preservation of the works of "masters" such as Picasso, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet, and so many others, I have to wonder if preserving the actual art of a street artist (rather than say taking picture before it gets painted over) does a disservice to the artist and other artists. After all, the critics within the street art community show their displeasure by just painting over a work they don't like, usually with a scrawled accompanying message.

I look for street art when I go to big cities, and I even have seen some around Kaiserslautern. I like it. I think it's a good thing.

[BrownEyedCat]

Let's see if I can do my part to keep the thread alive! Mostly by sharing pictures.

I'm not fond of most traditional graffiti because, well... they're signatures. Beautifully made signatures, but on other people's property. Classy. It particularly made me sad when there was graffiti up on the wall of the Indy theater within a few days of it getting beautifully painted. There's something to be said for creating a building with aesthetic. It may not be art, strictly, but many artistic qualities go into a design.

But I also live in a fairly artsy little town, and stencils show up from time to time. Usually they're very small stencils on the sidewalk or walls with a simple political message. But sometimes you find other things. I particularly liked this one, which was on the side of the Wild Buffalo Tavern:



Just a horse skeleton. I liked it better before someone added the wings, personally.

It's a sizable one, too:



It was painted over some time last year, but it had been up for so long I can only imagine some third person defaced it in a way that was less attractive than the wings.

In a particularly artsy town, though, graffiti can be the exception rather than the rule- especially when businesses and the community are going out of their way to add art to the scenery intentionally. Murals and statues are all over downtown- and look what the indy movie theater did to spruce up the giant pieces of plywood that they used to cover the storefront of their new location while major construction was going on:



I took pics because I knew it was temporary. And as needs of the building changed, the plywood was cut and installed in different places around the front, still impressively arranged.







Now that I've posted four images of non-graffiti I should probably find a point.

My reaction to street art depends a lot on its content and placement. There's a difference between making a statement and writing your name, between adding to a blank wall and detracting from the aesthetic of a place. My opinions on any given graffiti wind up being very fluid, depending on how these things interact.

Haven't seen the Banksy doc yet, but I want to. I just have some strange horror of renting things off the new releases wall at my local movie rental shops.

[Ti-Phil]

Technically BEC, what you've posted is art, not a mere signature without real meaning/sense except to the author and rival gang.
But art, for art sake, which is both pleasant to the eye and aesthetically linked to the building it is made onto, can make a drab city environment into something more.
There is a few example of this in Montréal but alas have no picture of it yet.

[BrownEyedCat]

This isn't what I was referring to by signature. When I said signature, I meant the literal signatures. I don't have any pics of them on hand.

The Dreamspace one was no doubt commissioned, so it doesn't even count as graffiti, really. I just went around taking pics of art downtown one day.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

There is an ENORMOUS rooster on the side of a building in a neighboring town. I haven't been close enough to it to see whether it was intentionally there, although judging by it's size and location I suppose it probably isn't graffiti. Nevertheless I always like looking at it when I drive past.

Like BEC said, there are certain times I feel uncomfortable with graffiti. There are times when I think to myself, someone took the time to design that building, and a whole mess of people helped build and decorate it, and then one person comes along and adds something that distracts all attention from the rest of the building.

At the same time, bland, vast slabs of concrete and stucco, as what makes up the backs of things like shopping plazas, storage facilities, factories, et cetera, seem almost like wasted canvas, and I don't mind seeing thought-provoking art there. People's names scrawled down with little thought, or illegible signatures, I don't care for at all. But I don't think there's enough art in day to day life unless you're a person who actively goes looking for it, so when I do see something clever or technically involved somewhere, I find it generally positive, as perhaps someone feeling out of sorts shall walk past it today and find meaning in it.

[McDuffies]

To be honest, I was also deleting the thread, not only Ahaugen.

I love grafitti, specially high-profile grafitti like Banksy. Banksy's work contains everything that I believe art should have; one of the most fascinating things about his work is the subtext behind it, a strong philosophical current, something that gallery art nowadays largely lacks; his art is validated by the fact that subtext is created by the place, building on which grafitti is made, as much as picture, and that they are viewed best by casual passers by. Remove a particular grafitti from it's enviroment, and much like an outside sculpture, it loses it's power.
The problem is that grafitti is a guerilla art; institutionalize it and it becomes a mural. The countercultural, antiauthorial element is important part of it. Other kinds of "vandalizing" art are also interesting, subvertising in particular.
But as much as I like good grafitti, I also hate lame, vandalizing grafitti, specially when people are just rewriting those most populat grafitti sentences... if you're damaging other people's property instead of making it better, at least have some purpose for doing it.

[Heart]

I love graffiti, as long as it's quality work, and some consideration was taken when choosing a location. If someone slapped graffiti on my garage door (even Banksy), I'd be pretty pissed. But if someone did this
to the street in front of my house, I would love it.

[Risky]

Most of Banksy's stuff that I've seen, I can get behind. Tags I can't. Tags are just stupid, and even the fanciest ones that probably took days and show a lot of style are basically meaningless. But that's digressing... because frankly, it's not art. A signature is what you put down in the corner of your art to show you are particularly proud of it.

I support street art. My city is known for guerrilla art installations of all sorts and I support them. Even if the only message is "have more fun", even if the message is a little disturbing, I support art in all things and encourage it. If it's on the side of someone's building, obviously they can decide if they want to keep it there or not. I would hope that the artist did enough to make it meaningful and good that the proprietor would want to keep it there, and the proprietor would be understanding enough to see the good in it. Unless it's a scathing criticism of the business, like a sudden mural of homeless drunks peeing on the side of a liquor store... in that case, I would both be pleased with the art and fully understand the owner's desire to remove it, heh.

I also like institutionalized street art a lot of the time... for example on the side of a bar recently an artist was painting a huge mural for a long time, and I was intrigued each time I passed. Then later I saw it on the side of a bus terminal as a poster... sure enough, when I came back to the wall later, the completed image was an ad for Yahoo.com. It was still cool though, and in this case definitely better than the blank wall.

[Yeahduff]

I enjoy tagging. Temporary street color typically in an alley or on a boring ass new condo.

[Risky]

Seems wasteful... like a charity using their donation fund to buy business cards.

[Yeahduff]

The ad's lame, yeah. That sort of thing and this Banksy movie, not to mention the scores of graffiti artists who find themselves showing in galleries, signal a taming of graffiti, like it's one step away from being completely institutionalized.

[Laemkral]

I like the art that's been put up, some very good examples. I do agree with yeah duff that it has been commercialized, but that which is popular is going to be exploited. Is Banksy a sell out? I know many think he is, but I think he's just smart and realizes he can make money and keep doing what he does. Maybe that's the definition of a sellout, I don't know.

I think the film is a good look into street art, because it is by nature something that happens in secret. You will almost never get to see the creative process that goes into making it, even if that process is just a bunch of stencils or paper strips. And I think it will do a lot to make people question the subject. If anything it's a very good commentary on just how gullible people can be about accepting stuff as art.

[McDuffies]

My opinion is that Banksy is trying to balance commercialization with guerilla approach. First one is important if nothing then because professionals are always taken more seriously than hobbists, and it's natural tendency of subculture to conquer the mainstream; grafitti artist should not wait until he's long dead for art critics and public to start considering him. But I think that there's a lot of struggle to preserve the essential subculture spirit too. Now, in every subculture people get possesive, get mad whenever something seems to slip out of their hands and become public's, but that's unreasonable. Comparing Banksy to contemporary high art or commercial artists shows that he operated on a whole different level; comparing him to his beginnings is not the best idea because every artist, naturally, progresses. Hell if he was still an unknown, anonimously stenciling stuff around London, I'd have hardly heard of him.

[Yeahduff]

I'm less concerned with him being a sellout than about the movement playing itself out. And I'm less "concerned" with it so much as I'm resigned to it happening, if it hasn't already.

[McDuffies]

Thing is, it's a movement, but it's also a medium, and mediums usually don't die out. Their popularity fluctuates, but they're always somewhere out there.

[Laemkral]

As a medium, it has a lot of potential for growth. Lots of room to grow and mature because it has a very broad range. As a movement, it is probably on the downslope. I say that for a variety of reasons:
-major artists are having their works bought and sold like conventional artists
-Banksy made a documentary about it
-we have a thread about it
-I know about it, from a walking tour in Berlin

To me, that doesn't scream cutting edge movement.

[McDuffies]

But, hm, you know... grafitti art is being made everywhere in the world, independently of Banksy. Much of grafitti artists here haven't even heard of him, and couldn't care less about what he does. Grafitti art is largely a spontaneous response to urbanisation, and Banksy is just some guy who's really good at it, people used to scribble on public walls long before it was sort-of-institutionalized by hip hop movement and whatnot. And anyways, wouldn't it be kind of like saying that rap has played out as soon as it started playing on mtv, yet rap is still alive and well?

[Yeahduff]

To be honest hip hop hasn't been cutting edge for a while either. Once VH1 decided that they'd let Left Eye rap on all those TLC mega-hits, it was all over.

The fact that it remains illegal and likely always will be ensures graffiti will always be at least a little bit dangerous. But I think the bell's been tolling since Basquiat started selling paintings.

[McDuffies]

To be honest hip hop hasn't been cutting edge for a while either. Once VH1 decided that they'd let Left Eye rap on all those TLC mega-hits, it was all over.

The fact that it remains illegal and likely always will be ensures graffiti will always be at least a little bit dangerous. But I think the bell's been tolling since Basquiat started selling paintings.

But that's the way things go, isn't it? There was a time when jazz was cutting edge, then it got mainstream and some other things became counterculture. Despite that, jazz's still great, even after the likes of Kenny G pissed all over it.
Not that I'm saying rap is awesome or anything.