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Splashing the Art World With Anger and Questions
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: June 30, 2007
New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/arts/design/30kimm.html?_r=1&ref=design&oref=slogin
Until the pranks turned ugly, it was heartening to follow the dust-up
between a bunch of street artists and their nemesis or nemeses, identity
unknown. As The New York Times reported this week, for some time works of
stenciled graffiti art and wheat-pasted posters slapped onto walls in
Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan have been splashed with paint and scrawled with
messages of protest.
Related
The 16-Page Splasher Manifesto (June 27, 2007)
As Street Art Goes Commercial, a Resistance Raises a Real Stink (June 28,
2007)
Art Critic or Vandal? ‘The Splasher’ Leaves Clues (June 27, 2007)
Anonymous claimants have distributed various communiqués taking
responsibility for the sabotage, citing the Situationists of the 1950s and
’60s as inspiration. One manifesto declared street art “a
bourgeois-sponsored rebellion,” politically impotent, facilitating
gentrification.
It was, if nothing else, good to hear that art was still being contested in
the streets, not just marketed and sold in Chelsea. But then, earlier this
month, as the summer silly season started, somebody lobbed a stink bomb into
the opening of a show by Faile, a Brooklyn street art collective, on the
Lower East Side. Everybody was forced to leave after fire engines arrived.
On June 21 at Shepard Fairey’s opening in Dumbo, Brooklyn, a tall,
24-year-old Harry Potter look-alike named James Cooper was arrested after
witnesses said he, along with another man, who got away, tried to light a
similar bomb in a metal coffee canister. The police charged Mr. Cooper with
reckless endangerment, criminal possession of a weapon, harassment and other
crimes. He has denied the charges.
Guy Debord, the Situationist writer and spokesman who, before he died in
1994, couldn’t resist responding to anybody who barely mentioned him, would
no doubt be exercised by this latest invocation of his legacy. A
Situationist in Paris did once dress up as a Dominican priest and read an
anti-theist tract to a baffled congregation at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
In Copenhagen, in the ’60s, members of a group calling itself the Movement
for a Scandinavian Bauhaus Situationniste were suspected by the police of
being responsible for the decapitation of “The Little Mermaid,” the city’s
famous symbol, and absconding with the head. Still, Situationist pranks were
pointedly political. Across nearly half a century of random art world
mischief, they seem almost scientific in their focus, by comparison with
young people who toss stink bombs at gallery openings or splash paint on
street art. The current agitators, although they’ve got some of the
revolutionary patter down, seem to lack clearly defined targets or
priorities. Is the problem gentrification or the art market or artists or
late capitalism? What’s troubling them — the street art they’re defacing or
the fact that some of the street artists might also show in galleries?
And, by the way, what’s wrong with artists, even street artists, making a
buck? The spectacle, as Debord might have said, of the present art world in
thrall to Mammon is incredibly depressing. But selling art isn’t selling
out, necessarily, and making art for people on the street doesn’t preclude
showing (a different sort of) art in galleries. Physical endangerment in the
form of bombs, stinky or otherwise, then crosses the line from mischief to
mayhem.
I suspect the agitators have read history books about the 1980s, which for
Mr. Cooper’s generation must seem like the Dark Ages. The art market back
then scooped up graffiti artists, a co-optation entailing, as the Princeton
art historian Hal Foster has said, an element of racial appropriation.
The demographics are different now. Most graffiti artists of the ’80s, Keith
Haring aside, ultimately flopped as commercial painters because context is
everything. A subway car is not a living room. Failure derived from a lack
of private initiative and visual sense, not from anything to do with making
public art, which during the ’80s art market craze was, despite the blight
of many public spaces by graffiti and the criminal act itself, a useful
counterpoint to all the lunacy of spending and hype.
Does street art gentrify neighborhoods? Graffiti didn’t gentrify SoHo. Wall
Street did. It didn’t gentrify subways. From West Philadelphia to East Los
Angeles, much of the best street painting is in poor neighborhoods that have
resisted change. It’s hard to feel sympathetic with vandals splashing paint
on posters or stenciled pictures, notwithstanding that some of the splashes
look kind of aesthetic.
All that said, public space and civic justice are difficult issues to which
the brouhaha returns our attention. New York neighborhoods are indeed
changing, not all for the better, as the city becomes more affluent and
homogeneous, and art shouldn’t exist in it simply as a symbol of wealth and
privilege. It should seize public spaces where it can, to make itself more
part of daily life, more relevant in the world, and to become a source of
serendipity, pleasure, trouble, controversy and interest to people outside
the art world, not just inside it.
Minus the incendiary devices, this latest little flap is proof that art can
still matter.
Published: June 30, 2007
New York Timeshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/arts/design/30kimm.html?_r=1&ref=design&oref=slogin
Until the pranks turned ugly, it was heartening to follow the dust-up
between a bunch of street artists and their nemesis or nemeses, identity
unknown. As The New York Times reported this week, for some time works of
stenciled graffiti art and wheat-pasted posters slapped onto walls in
Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan have been splashed with paint and scrawled with
messages of protest.
Related
The 16-Page Splasher Manifesto (June 27, 2007)
As Street Art Goes Commercial, a Resistance Raises a Real Stink (June 28,
2007)
Art Critic or Vandal? ‘The Splasher’ Leaves Clues (June 27, 2007)
Anonymous claimants have distributed various communiqués taking
responsibility for the sabotage, citing the Situationists of the 1950s and
’60s as inspiration. One manifesto declared street art “a
bourgeois-sponsored rebellion,” politically impotent, facilitating
gentrification.
It was, if nothing else, good to hear that art was still being contested in
the streets, not just marketed and sold in Chelsea. But then, earlier this
month, as the summer silly season started, somebody lobbed a stink bomb into
the opening of a show by Faile, a Brooklyn street art collective, on the
Lower East Side. Everybody was forced to leave after fire engines arrived.
On June 21 at Shepard Fairey’s opening in Dumbo, Brooklyn, a tall,
24-year-old Harry Potter look-alike named James Cooper was arrested after
witnesses said he, along with another man, who got away, tried to light a
similar bomb in a metal coffee canister. The police charged Mr. Cooper with
reckless endangerment, criminal possession of a weapon, harassment and other
crimes. He has denied the charges.
Guy Debord, the Situationist writer and spokesman who, before he died in
1994, couldn’t resist responding to anybody who barely mentioned him, would
no doubt be exercised by this latest invocation of his legacy. A
Situationist in Paris did once dress up as a Dominican priest and read an
anti-theist tract to a baffled congregation at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
In Copenhagen, in the ’60s, members of a group calling itself the Movement
for a Scandinavian Bauhaus Situationniste were suspected by the police of
being responsible for the decapitation of “The Little Mermaid,” the city’s
famous symbol, and absconding with the head. Still, Situationist pranks were
pointedly political. Across nearly half a century of random art world
mischief, they seem almost scientific in their focus, by comparison with
young people who toss stink bombs at gallery openings or splash paint on
street art. The current agitators, although they’ve got some of the
revolutionary patter down, seem to lack clearly defined targets or
priorities. Is the problem gentrification or the art market or artists or
late capitalism? What’s troubling them — the street art they’re defacing or
the fact that some of the street artists might also show in galleries?
And, by the way, what’s wrong with artists, even street artists, making a
buck? The spectacle, as Debord might have said, of the present art world in
thrall to Mammon is incredibly depressing. But selling art isn’t selling
out, necessarily, and making art for people on the street doesn’t preclude
showing (a different sort of) art in galleries. Physical endangerment in the
form of bombs, stinky or otherwise, then crosses the line from mischief to
mayhem.
I suspect the agitators have read history books about the 1980s, which for
Mr. Cooper’s generation must seem like the Dark Ages. The art market back
then scooped up graffiti artists, a co-optation entailing, as the Princeton
art historian Hal Foster has said, an element of racial appropriation.
The demographics are different now. Most graffiti artists of the ’80s, Keith
Haring aside, ultimately flopped as commercial painters because context is
everything. A subway car is not a living room. Failure derived from a lack
of private initiative and visual sense, not from anything to do with making
public art, which during the ’80s art market craze was, despite the blight
of many public spaces by graffiti and the criminal act itself, a useful
counterpoint to all the lunacy of spending and hype.
Does street art gentrify neighborhoods? Graffiti didn’t gentrify SoHo. Wall
Street did. It didn’t gentrify subways. From West Philadelphia to East Los
Angeles, much of the best street painting is in poor neighborhoods that have
resisted change. It’s hard to feel sympathetic with vandals splashing paint
on posters or stenciled pictures, notwithstanding that some of the splashes
look kind of aesthetic.
All that said, public space and civic justice are difficult issues to which
the brouhaha returns our attention. New York neighborhoods are indeed
changing, not all for the better, as the city becomes more affluent and
homogeneous, and art shouldn’t exist in it simply as a symbol of wealth and
privilege. It should seize public spaces where it can, to make itself more
part of daily life, more relevant in the world, and to become a source of
serendipity, pleasure, trouble, controversy and interest to people outside
the art world, not just inside it.
Minus the incendiary devices, this latest little flap is proof that art can
still matter.
roncalavera |
Latest page update: made by roncalavera
, Jul 4 2007, 1:49 PM EDT
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