'Guerilla' Advertising Masquerades as Graffiti. Companies are increasingly turning to graffiti and street art to give themselves a more youthful image.
Taggers complain that this commercialization could destroy the street art subculture. Isn't this already done in the fashionized markets like skateboarding, surfing, street clothing etc.? SPIEGEL
7 Comments
Like how Andre Balazs recently hired graffiti artists to design t-shirts to promote the three locations of his hotels?
http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2008/12/andre_balazs_li.php
Hold on, before any comment on this they need to watch: Style Wars. It document the graffiti artists of late 1970s/early 1980s, and some of what the issues that this article is talking about has some foundation of what that documentary was portraying. Style Wars- go get educated
Watch it here: Style Wars
1983, Public Art Films Inc.
By the way, you don't need to be a graffiti scholar to read the Spiegel article and understand what it is saying.
Street culture has very little to fear i think. Sure advertising continues to be a nuisance (mebbe the new video walls in LA are the exception) but the street writers will always have the upper hand. Defeat can only be self-inflicted it would seem.
I don't know if this is just a Boston thing, but it seems like around here all the "street artists" are trust fund brats from Connecticut who shop and hang out at high-end "street fashion" boutiques. Sorry, but this medium has very little legitimacy to me insofar as its anti-corporate stance is concerned. I'm open to someone informing me otherwise, and I know there is interesting stuff out there, but I think there's a huge difference between political, almost appropriation or insurgency graffiti, which is less common, and "street art"/"street fashion", which is becoming ubiquitous.
That article loses credibility by assuming that listening to AC/DC and The Strokes is rebellious. As with any fad, and the surge in popularity of graffiti definitely indicates a fad, it will eventually die a horrible death when a new fad arrives. Then the true artists and rebels can reappropriate it.
For further reading, be sure to check out Sponsorship, by Ryan McGinness:
Sponsorship is a Ryan McGinness book documenting and expanding upon the ideas and images to arise from an exhibition staged at BLK/MKRT Gallery in Los Angeles in 2003. Sponsorship forwards an intense dialog amongst many of the artists central to the corporate sponsorship debate through a series of 19 interviews. Responses to McGinness' probing questions regarding accepting corporate backing for artistic endeavors and dealing with companies great and small run the gamut. Sponsorship features interviews with FUTURA, Barry McGee (TWIST), KAWS, Romon Yang (RO-STARR), DALEK, David Ellis (SKWERM), Brendan Fowler (BARR), Todd James (REAS), Christian Strike and essays by Carlo McCormick, Jacqui Millar, Steve Powers, Shepard Fairey, Adam Glickman and Rob Walker.
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