Graffiti world: street art from five continents (original) (raw)
Graffiti: Commercially Accepted – Socially Rejected
2008
Graffiti and advertising; two contrasting forms of communication sharing a multitude of common themes, advertising being the very tool of a capitalistic society, graffiti, however occurring as a medium of visual freedom. At a time of a universal, even so incoherent identity loss as a consequence of society’s orientation towards materialism above all, commerce adapts new values, traditionally belonging to underground subcultures, which end up as brand values. Graffiti is gradually transformed from a form of urban art to an advertising medium, or a brand’s very value. In this discourse we are examining how this is conveyed in today’s world of fashion and electronics and what the motives fuelling the authorities judgement, between acceptance and neglectfulness, are; withal our consequential objective is to judge impartially the commercialisation of something that was brought to life in a pure, urban and in a sense, a very innocent environment: graffiti.
Graffiti Aesthetics • Some Notes
Graffiti may or may not be art, and that may or may not matter. To those ends I discuss a half dozen or so pieces in different styles, show that, whatever his particular style, Ceaze’s letterforms do not overlap, identify X-form and ‘crazy organic’ as styles, and distinguish between ‘old school’ and wild style. Moreover, because of its insistence on the name as the basic matrix of a piece, graffiti may represent a break from the past comparable to the adoption of 3D perspective in the early modern era and the creation of abstraction at the beginning of the modern. Finally, graffiti exists on at least a half dozen different quality levels.
Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City
Avramidis, K., & Tsilimpounidi, M. (Eds.). (2017). Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. London: Routledge.
Graffiti and street art images are ubiquitous and enjoy a very special place in collective imaginary due to their ambiguous nature. Sometimes enigmatic in meaning, often stylistically crude and aesthetically aggressive, yet always visually arresting, they fill our field of vision with texts and images that no one can escape. As they take place on surfaces and travel through various channels, they provide viewers an entry point to the subtext of the cities we live in, while questioning how we read, write and represent them. This book is structured around these three distinct, albeit by definition interwoven, key frames. The contributors of this volume critically investigate underexplored urban contexts in which graffiti and street art appear, shed light on previously unexamined aspects of these practices, and introduce innovative methodologies regarding the treatment of these images. Throughout, the focus is on the relationship of graffiti and street art with urban space, and the various manifestations of these idiosyncratic meetings. In this book, the emphasis is shifted from what the physical texts say to what these practices and their produced images do in different contexts. All chapters are original and come from experts in various fields, such as Architecture, Urban Studies, Sociology, Criminology, Anthropology, and Visual Cultures, as well as scholars that transcend traditional disciplinary frameworks. This exciting new collection is an essential reading for advanced undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics interested in the subject matter. It is also accessible to a non-academic audience, such as art practitioners and policy makers alike, or anyone keen in deepening their knowledge on how graffiti and street affect the ways urban environments are experienced, understood and envisioned.
Getting Up: Graffiti and the Rise of Street Art
Getting Up: Graffiti and the Rise of Street Art You can spot it on walls, floors, ceilings, outside or inside, be it a scribble on the side of a dumpster, to a mural that beautifies the lengths of entire buildings. Chances are that if you have been to any urban area (or anywhere else) that you"ve seen graffiti, perhaps without even realizing it. Graffiti is a popular form of street art, which is a visual arts movement characterized by its presence in public space, and its wild diversity of mediums and styles. Many forms of street art, such as graffiti, often bear the stigma of vandalism, and this attitude is reflected in many parts of the world by punitive legislation. Even so, graffiti still pervades urban culture, and has even been integrated into society through formal galleries and commissioned work. Regardless of its con-
The emblem of agency and resistance within graffiti
At present, graffiti is reflexively devalued as a form of vandalism disseminated by lower-class citizens championing rebellion against the status-quo. Perhaps the graffiti artist"s disobedience to authoritative institutions is to blame for detachment of social appreciation from its potential for creative integrity. Street art is scarcely praised as an art form that requires intensive artistic skill to execute deeper messages and meanings. This essay therefore aims to open up graffiti"s place as a visual form of cultural practice and the extent to which graffiti employs agentive action. Moreover, it allows for the exploration of issues faced by researchers when analysing graffiti culture.
This Will Not Be Available On Canvas Later: Graffiti Invades the Art World
2016
This paper explores the influence of graffiti writing on three artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and David Wojnarowicz. It discusses the political, economic, and social environment of the United States in the 1980s and how it contributed to the formation of the graffiti subculture. Graffiti art emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City. This new art form arose in beleaguered communities as a way for graffiti writers to assert control over their urban environment. While Basquiat, Haring, and Wojnarowicz did not call themselves graffiti writers, their techniques, concepts, and attitudes influenced their oeuvres and how each artist presented himself to the art market. This paper demonstrates how these three artists claimed control over their bodies of work rather than become influenced by commercial art galleries. All three of these artists challenged mainstream gallery art by producing works more accessible to the general public. Basquiat, Haring, and Wojnarowicz each...
Street Art & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal, 2015
There is an abundance of books, magazines, films and internet-forums dedicated to graffiti. How this documentation has influenced and been a part of the graffiti subculture has not been studied much. Drawing on personal experiences, as a documentarian and publisher of graffiti media over 27 years, Malcolm Jacobson recollects how the positions of participant and observer incessantly have twisted around each other. This has been mediated through development in media technology as well as by the coming of age of graffiti and its practitioners.
Graffiti, Street Art, Urban Art: Terminological Problems and Generic Properties
2013
In the last ten years, street art has become a very important factor in the international art scene. It has become a precious object to buy and preserve, and yet there is considerable confusion about the generic properties and definition of street art in academic research. As a rightful part of popular culture and urban culture, street art is not pure and independent. It intertwines with different art forms and urban subcultures and nurtures spin-off production. Therefore it is quite hard to trace its borders. Street art is not graffiti. They are different visual expressions and even though they might share the same space, artists and techniques, they still produce visually and conceptually different art works. This confusion produces many layers of problematic issues which put the street artists both on the police wanted lists and in the most important galleries and museums such as the Tate Modern in London, Grand Palais in Paris and MOCA in Los Angeles to name the few. In addition, in some official documents and in auction houses graffiti and street art are referred to as urban art, a term not used or understood by the members of the subculture. It is not clear what graffiti, street art and urban art are and how they are positioned within the contemporary culture. Therefore it is necessary to deal with the generic terms first and only after this issue has been solved, one can look at all these terms from different perspectives. is paper aims at resolving these problems without offering new definitions but by explaining the terms used both in subcultures and in academic research.
2020
Graffiti as a spatial and material practice linked to Hip Hop culture emerged in the early 1970s in the urban landscape of New York and Philadelphia. It developed as a response to the spatio-political context within which minority and marginal groups were dwelling, and has since been practiced globally by a multiplicity of people following the New York City graffiti pandemic of the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. Graffiti has evolved into various urban art forms and since the turn of the twenty-first century is commonly located under the broader discipline of “street art ”. This entry explains and uncovers vernacular graffiti as a lesser-known phenomenon in non-urban Britain by UK-based graffiti writers.
Long Live the Tag: Representing the Foundations of Graffiti
This short chapter examines the inherent contradictions of graffiti often thought of in simple polarities, such as legal vs. illegal, or art vs. vandalism. My aim is to challenge these conceptual binaries by focusing on one of the most enduring and least understood aspects of graffiti writing, namely the tag. The impetus for this comes from the photo on the cover of this book, a provocative legal piece produced with an 'illegal aesthetics', i.e. tags. The chapter starts by contextualizing my own first 'reading' of graffiti tags, then talks about how the 'writing' of graffiti is practiced, and concludes with a detailed discussion of TWIST (Barry McGee) and AMAZE's (Josh Lazcano) collage of graffiti tags that vividly represents the contradictions of this subculture and its reception from the public. This chapter attempts to glorify in a small way, the most basic, and arguably the most hated, form of graffiti-the tag. Graffiti tags represent the science of style-the aestheticized repetitive practice of writing the letters in a name in an effort to create a personal calligraphy. Tags are most often performed in public spaces under difficult circumstances and when done skillfully they are as beautiful as any mural. This is well known to the members of the subculture (and most who study it) but complete heresy to the rest of the world. Graffiti as we know it cannot exist without the tag. It is the essential component for learning, practicing and mastering the form of graffiti as vandalistic art. In the last two decades, as the mainstream has begrudgingly come to accept the artistic merit of graffiti murals or pieces, the notion that tags are done by unskilled