Street Art, Public City : Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination

What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime? Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city. Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally. "This book investigates street art and graffiti as cultural practices at the borders of legality and illegality. Cities are engaged in a continual process of cultural production through which their self-image is developed and refined; a process that is sometimes legal -- as with architecture, statuary, signage, advertising, and public art -- and sometimes not -- with practices such as billposting, graffiti and street art. Alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) considered criminal, gentrifying, or commercial, street art exists and operates on the boundaries between the legal and illegal, and between art, crime, and culture. Given its capacity to generate discussion and polarise opinion, street art is a cultural practice that can inform us about the nature of urban life and the limits of public space. Street Art, Public City: Crime and the Urban Imagination draws upon fifteen years of research to examines the ways in which street art has become as integral part of cities' cultural identities. It will be of interest to readers in the fields of street art and graffiti specifically, but also to those interested in issues relating to cities and urban space, legal geography, cultural criminology as well as cultural studies and art more generally."-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Street Art, Public City 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 List of plates 7 List of figures 8 Acknowledgements 10 1 The situational artwork 14 encounter: watching JR 50 2 The cities in the city 54 encounter: criminal damage? 72 3 Cityscapes 74 encounter: losing the image 108 4 Criminalising the image 112 encounter: things on walls 138 5 Street art and spatial politics 140 encounter: Banksy under glass 160 6 Transformations: urban imagination in the public city 164 Bibliography 178 Index 188 This text investigates the practices of street art and graffiti as cultural practices at the borders of legality and illegality. Based upon 15 years of research, it examines the ways in which street art has become as integral part of cities' cultural identities