Death to ‘street art’
I can’t stand the term street-art. It’s banal, it’s lazy, and it has an inherent snobbery about it that makes me squirm.
Art in the street already has a name; graffiti. I don’t care if you’re going about it with wild-style throw-ups, Posca tags, wheat-paste, stencils, or whatever the hell Invader does, it is all graffiti. Graffiti has been around since ancient Greece, and pieces have given us insights into the zeitgeist of the times they were produced, so why now after thousands of years do we insist on using the term street-art?
Street-art is the watered down friendly name for graffiti, a term that emerged after seemingly everyone read Wall and Peace and decided that the cheeky scampish attitudes of Banksy ‘were just so now’. Street-art represents sale-ability, and invokes a feeling of ‘ohhh we get it now, so quaint, so funky’. It’s a view of graffiti that is homogenised, removing the spontaneity and danger of the medium and replacing it with Instagrammable screens, and crap canvas art for rubbish bistros.
To those that champion street-art, ‘graffiti’ means vandalism and nothing more. It means scrawlings under bridges by hoody-wearing thugs in tough neighbourhoods. It means keying your name into a perspex bus-stop and being ready to leg-it when the police come for you. It represents illegality, and a side of life many people don’t wish to acknowledge.
But like all things, that which was once deemed shocking becomes a highly marketable commodity. It happened to punk, it happened to skateboarding, it happened to stand-up comedy, it has happened to graffiti. You can place your bets now on what it’ll happen to next.
When SEEN was bombing New York train cars in the 1970s he wasn’t picturing the Upper West-Side elite fawning over his works in Sothebys, he did it because he wanted people to see what he could do, and he wanted to make people talk. Yes, his work now sells for immense sums of money and you cannot begrudge him for it one bit, but he started out because he loved the emerging culture, a culture which captured the soul of a crumbling decaying New York.
When the Banksy vs Robbo feud started, people were outraged that this thuggish Robbo dared breathe the same air as Banksy. Banksy pieces vandalised by Robbo and his crew were instantaneously restored, despite the long-standing traditions and rules of ‘getting up’ and going over other people’s work, despite the fact that Banksy had gone over a piece of graffiti history.
This is no disrespect to Banksy, but the cult of personality he has (un)wittingly created has distorted what graffiti is. I hate the way his pieces get protected with perspex, while pieces by others are deemed illegal blights. What was once subjective, is now presented as fact, and that is not what art is supposed to be.
You have to objectively put all graffiti pieces on the same playing field; you cannot protect one and demonise another, regardless of talent or ‘artistic integrity’. You either deem all graffiti as illegal or all as artistic statements, no matter whether it is a painstakingly beautiful mural, or 20-foot high letters saying ‘RON IS A PRICK’.
Again, this is not to say that graffiti artists shouldn’t be able to sell their pieces to the highest bidder, it’s the toast of the art world so why not get a slice for yourself? We’re living in a world where one of Basquiat’s pieces sold for far more than any Monet ever has, a world where Keith Haring’s work is arguably far more recognisable to most than the vast body of Paul Gauguin.
But if both were starting up today would they be given the light of day? Would Basquiat’s early SAMO© works be written off as nonsensical scribblings because they were not marketable? Would Haring’s one-line babies be seen as childish hieroglyphics and not ‘proper street-art’?
People want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the culture and vibrancy of a Bristol or a Berlin, but they don’t want the rough edges that come with it. They want to ignore the grotesque, the frenzied, the challenging, and instead focus on artworks that ‘beautify’ the area. They want to disregard the murals of Belfast and Northern Ireland, and focus on the humorous and twee. It is fine to prefer a certain style of art, but taste is open to debate, and one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. By controlling what is and isn’t allowed you’re perpetuating gentrification, but with an ironic post-modern twist.
So let’s discard all this bollocks. You don’t call sculptures ‘stone-art’, you don’t call Renaissance-era paintings ‘canvas-art’, so don’t do graffiti artists a disservice by calling their work ‘street-art’. Enjoy graffiti for what it is, and if it disappears after a week then feel pride that you witnessed a unique piece of art which will never be recreated.
