Art on the Streets:Past and present practices (original) (raw)
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Special Issue: Street Art's Politics and Discontents
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies , 2020
Street art, with its subcultural character and sociability, has been looked upon for its anti-cultural potential. While some accounts have diverted attention to street art's utopia with its creative dissidence and regenerative potential, others have insisted that street art has already been coopted by the aesthetic and institutional order of the neoliberal economy. This special issue aims to contribute to the critical perspectives of cultural geography, urban sociology, art history, visual studies and critical theory through analyses of the urban space and street art. The prolific significance of this issue is in its multi-perspective approach to bring together social, political and aesthetic dimensions in the intersection of art and the changing urban environment. Recently, activist art, social practice and socially engaged art are just a few terms that have been popular for describing art that attempts to attract public attention to the current social and political landscape. This thematic journal issue explores the potential theoretical and empirical inputs that a spatial and urban approach of art can bring to the understanding of both arts and the urban space. It offers a multi-geographical, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary perspective to analyze how street art, as an aesthetic dispositive, functions as an integral part in the socio-political space of the urban landscape. Street art contests two main regimes of visibility-legal and governmental on one side, and artworld or social aesthetic on the other-which creates the conditions within which it must compete for visibility. How can we interpret the politics of street art from the perspective of subcultures, freedom of expression, and limits of criminality? Are street artists obliged to be a part of the urban resistance against neoliberalism? How does street art reveal, delimit or question the complexity of neoliberal urbanization? How is street art activism perceived by the authorities, politicians, businesses, and the wider public? What prompts street artists to communicate with urban dwellers with their marks on the city's surface? How does street art partake in social movements? This special issue hopes to continue academics' and artists' conversations on street art's relationship with the urban space and the public as a defining element of urban culture, but also offers a critical look at the spatial and political dynamics that reflect territorially embedded mechanisms that generate particular social and cultural processes.
Art’s practical place in reconstituting the urban space as one of the defining elements of urban culture renders a twofold role. The role of art in the neoliberal urban planning shows that art is an integral part of current capitalist processes that are turning the neoliberal art subject in a source of capital—both as a resource for tourism and a real estate investment. However, recent research has found that arts and art establishments are not as significant in gentrification processes as before (Grodach, Fostor, Murdoch 2018). Indeed, art has been both a product of and a response to the unequal distribution of resources and visibility in the city through the processes of new urban planning. For example, a growing resistance against neoliberal urbanism in Europe (Colomb & Novy 2016) demonstrates the relationship of artist communities and neighborhood organizations and challenges the prescriptive approaches to art’s role in neoliberal aestheticization.
GSA, 2023
Why should we have a journal dedicated solely to graffiti and street art? This essay defends the rationale for establishing GSA. Since the rise to prominence of street artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey, there has been renewed interest in urban creativity. In many major cities around the world, city walls have been transformed into canvasses for artistic expression. However, these works do not fall into the same category. Graffiti and street art belong to a specific kind. I argue that graffiti and street art are forms of art whose primary function is to challenge the dominant order of visibility in urban spaces. They embody the art of social subversion. Often, for various reasons, works of official public art are miscategorized as street art. But rather than being subversive, official public art aims at establishing a new order of visibility. It is the art of social change. My interest in developing an account distinguishing between graffiti and street art, on the one hand, and official public art, on the other hand, is not purely theoretical.; it is also practical. I'd like to develop a distinction that can help us better appreciate different types of urban art while also securing discursive and critical spaces that are unique to each kind. Throwing everything into the same pot risks losing some of the unique characteristics of these various art forms. A more nuanced account, instead, may have a positive effect on cultural and urban policies regulating creative expression in the city.
Art in the Streets of a Shattered City
Global economic trends have triggered processes of cultural re-territorialization in Latin American cities by fostering the desire to become "global cities." These processes have increased social inequality through the effects of economic polarization and the gentrification of urban areas. Manifestations of dissent are frequently expressed and negotiated through contesting non-institutional urban artistic practices, among them street art and "art in the streets." Urban groups have historically used cultural practices as politics of dissent. In the context of global cities, though, these cultural practices are threatened by public policies that favour cultural industries and attempt to manage them as goods and services for the overall production of added value to the city. The result is a culturally shattered geography of accented social marginality. This paper analyzes the regulation and domestication of art in the streets of Puebla, Mexico, in order to consider the impact of global economic trends on local urban cultures, cities, and citizens.