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February 5, 2009
Imaginative aesthetic subversions of public spaces currently span the globe ---from London's The Decapitator, Spain's Jorge Rodriguez Gerada, the Adbusters collective and the likes of Shepard Fairey and Banksy. The ethos is that streets were the new art schools and galleries.
One of the best examples is the work Poster Boy, a guerrilla artist who twists ads and billboards. It melds two artistic subcultures: street art and culture jamming. ) The New York subway has an especially rich heritage from the graffiti boom of the 1970s and 80s to recent installation work using sound and air. Culture jamming developed as a more precisely targeted assault on corporate communications, satirically inverting branding and advertising techniques.
Poster Boy, street art, subway
The intolerance to street art (as opposed to urban art inside galleries) comes from graffiti seen to be bringing with it a "general atmosphere of neglect and social decay, which in turn encourages crime". The tacit reference is to the "Broken Windows theory", first popularised in a 1982 article in the Atlantic Monthly by criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson. The idea is that minor signs of disorder, like graffiti, litter and broken windows, can give the dangerous impression that law has broken down in the neighbourhood; crime, so it's claimed, follows.
Kelling and Wilson href="conjured a vision of untended neighborhoods quickly reduced to crime-infested wastelands. First local boys rob a passed-out drunk on a lark; then muggers start robbing anyone who looks like he might have a few big bills in his wallet. Residents begin to view their neighborhood as unsafe, and retreat into their homes-or to the suburbs-abandoning the declining neighborhood to criminals.
Many Australian capitol cities, including Adelaide, have rebuilt their policing around the theory. They hold that small crime can have a big meaning, which is true, but the work of many street artists has more to do with the expression of youthful creativity and experimental culture in our over the last decade. Irrespective of the work's artistic merit, the "general atmosphere" it creates is one of vibrancy and possibility, not of "decay" or "neglect". It's more like a sculpture in a park than a broken window.
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I agree with you that the general atmosphere that sreet art creates is one of vibrancy and possibility. It's the proliferation of billboards, shopping malls and fast food joints that indicate decay & neglect. How can anyone that lives and breathes accept such misery in their neighbourhood?