‘From the Street to the Gallery: A Critical Analysis of the Inseparable Nature of Graffiti and Context’ discusses the rise of graffiti in the art world. Graffiti in urban settings has a different meaning than graffiti in a gallery. Is showing graffiti in a gallery okay? The elimination of the wall and the public spaces gets rid of a crucial part of the definition of graffiti. Illustrations within a city create a story and also a community. Museums create a structured environment, which imposes a certain conversation. This structure highlights the privilege of artists. In the street, graffiti is by fellow citizens and in galleried, we must follow the rules of the gallery and maintain a distance from the graffiti. Streets have no rules. We can touch, interact with, and interpret the graffiti freely. Geographical location is a crucial part of the meaning of graffiti. This article also brings up the idea of a fine artist. Graffiti artists who are shown in a gallery are considered fine artists, yet graffiti artists in the street are not. This highlights the inconsistency in privilege of graffiti artists. When a dealer becomes involved in the showing of graffiti, it loses its meaning. Graffiti can be exhibited, but it must be shown in its original context in order to maintain authenticity.
Graffiti and the Art-World post-seminar
Overall, I found the film Basquiat (1996) by Julian Schnabel to be very interesting and enlightening. I had little knowledge regarding Basquiat before the film, so I learned a lot about his life and relationship with other artists that I previously did not know. One of the scenes that really captured my attention was toward the end of the film where Basquiat tried to add his tag to some graffiti to make it worth more, and the graffiti artists rejected him, showing that he is no longer a part of that subculture. I think one of the most important questions to ask is if Basquiat’s art can still be considered graffiti. There was a clear distinction made between his street graffiti and “fine art” graffiti; they each had different styles and purposes. This leads me to wonder if his graffiti in the galleries can be considered graffiti because they were evidently made differently and with a different intention than his street graffiti. I thought the film was intriguing and well done, but sad at the end.
Graffiti and the Art World
This week’s reading “From the Street to the Gallery: A Critical Analysis of the Inseparable Nature of Graffiti and Context” by Alexandra K. Duncan criticized the display of graffiti in galleries because the white walls of a gallery cannot provide the same context as graffiti in the street. Some of the key points are that on the street, graffiti is illicit, unexpected, approachable, and accessible to all, but in a gallery, graffiti is commissioned, expected, closed off from contact, and only viewed by the upper-class society that visits museum. There is also a key difference between the static graffiti in a gallery and the tags on a train or subway car that rides throughout the city, and graffiti on canvas versus graffiti on rough, imperfect wall. Lastly, graffiti on the street is participating in a discourse with the surrounding graffiti, and this is not possible in a gallery.
Duncan Essay
Alexandra K. Duncan’s main purpose for writing this essay is to explain why placing graffiti in museums/galleries takes away from the legitimacy of the art, for context of a piece fundamentally plays a huge part in its overall message. Duncan primarily focuses on a former graffiti artist Zevs, whose pieces are very confrontational. For Duncan, placing Zevs’s art in a gallery context makes the confrontation Zevs is trying to create “artificially constructed (133).
I agree with Duncan for the most part; I do think that context does play a huge role in art, especially graffiti. Graffiti by its own nature relies heavily on context. On page 135 she uses tagging as an essential aspect of graffiti that is lost when it is placed in a gallery setting. I think it’s important to note that there have been distinctions made between street artists and taggers/writers; Zevs is probably considered more of a street artist than a tagger, and the art he puts into galleries most likely doesn’t create the social relations among taggers/writers that happens when graffiti is put on the streets. However, Zevs’s confrontational art is definitely more effective on the streets because it is more of a direct form of protest.