World famous street artist Shepard Fairey - the man whose “Hope” poster massively boosted Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign – has described an attempt to arrest him by Detroit police as “hilarious” after he was commissioned to do a mural in the city.

Last night authorities issued an arrest warrant for Fairey, 45, on graffiti charges with Police Sergeant Rebecca McKay issuing a statement warning: “Just because he’s a well-known artist does not take away from the fact that he is also a vandal.” — independent.co.uk

But how to draw the distinction between unauthorized graffiti and murals? Late last year, city officials issued thousands of dollars worth of fines before admitting they couldn't tell the difference between vandalism and authorized artwork (they eventually dismissed the fines). To correct this, Castañeda-López says the city is working on the seemingly Herculean task of creating a registry for all Detroit's existing street art. — metrotimes.com

Street artists are showing how they’d map cities differently in a new show that lets visitors step into their clandestine worlds.

[...] Mapping the City, an exhibition of the responses by 50 international street artists to being asked to map their cities “through subjective surveying rather than objective ordinance”. Conventional cartography this is not. — theguardian.com

A newly completed 125 ft high mural painted by Stik on a condemned council owned tower block in Acton, West London is the tallest street artwork in the UK.

The artwork depicts a mother and child looking forlornly from their condemned council block at the luxury apartment complexes being built around them. [...]

Charles Hocking House was built for low income families in 1967 and is earmarked to be torn down in 2016. — streetartnews.net

Neighborhoods of contemporary New York are primarily defined by the choices and actions of the people who call them home. They are collages fashioned from layer upon layer of small accretions that we plaster and paint onto our environments. Sometimes, this paint is literal [...] rich diversity of murals in memoriam found throughout Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn — public artworks that reflect a particular history of violence, racial prejudice, and, in some cases, the mixture of the two. — urbanomnibus.net

In July, Anasagasti hired a lawyer and filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit, accusing American Eagle of stealing his work and seeking monetary damages. If it sounds novel to apply copyright to graffiti art, that’s because it is: Lawyers who work in this area say it’s not clear anyone has ever tried this in court. Copyright law, as its name suggests, lays out the rules for when it’s okay to copy something. But does it extend to art that's on public walls? — theatlantic.com

5 Pointz, New York City’s “graffiti mecca,” is being demolished right now. This morning, a backhoe began tearing into the building that has served as a legal spot for aerosol artists for over two decades. In 2011, the property owner announced that he will be developing the site and transforming it into a massive residential condo complex. — animalnewyork.com

But, with all this push to quantize and characterize, there are dangers. Cities clearly are more than a new kind of physics problem. They are also creations of the human imagination and, as such, they live or die by the quality of the imagination we bring to them.

Thats why no discussion of the health of cities can be complete without thinking about the role of art — public art. — npr.org

Using images provided by cultural organizations worldwide, some of which were captured with Google’s Street View camera technology, [the Google Cultural Institute's Street Art Project] includes street art from around the globe, including work that no longer exists [...]

Google is the latest organization to wade into debates about how or whether to institutionalize, let alone commercialize, art that is ephemeral and often willfully created subversively. — nytimes.com

Jersey City-based art center Mana Contemporary—the exhibition branch of the Mana Fine Arts art storage, shipping, and packing empire—is building a street art museum in a former ice factory in Jersey City [...].

In addition to a rotating program of special exhibitions inside the institution, MMUA will boast specially-commissioned murals on its exterior walls, a large billboard where artists will create new works, and a full range of educational and community outreach programs. — news.artnet.com

Next week in London, The Sincura Group will be holding a similar auction of street pieces formally by Banksy. That’s the same company that last year successfully sold the Banksy “Slave Labour” wall at auction for just over $1 million. They’ve titled their auction Stealing Banksy? and it will include approximately 18 works, at least 7 of which are street pieces formally by Banksy that have been removed from their original locations, some of them specifically removed for this sale. — blog.vandalog.com

As more journalists are being arrested in Egypt, artists are under threat as well. [...]

Political slogans and portraits of people who have died since the January 25 revolution are painted over by the government and replaced immediately by artists. The walls of Mohamed Mahmoud Street leading to Tahrir Square are layers of colorful murals over asymmetrical blotches of white paint. And despite its attempt to silence, the dictatorial white ironically makes a great primer for many of the artworks. — blog.vandalog.com

On a brick wall near the Zaha Hadid Design Gallery in London's Clerkenwell district, tile and mosaic company Domus has crafted a likeness of Dame Zaha Hadid. But there is a trick to the installation by artist Greg Shapter—it is a three-dimensional, one-point-perspective piece that is best seen from an "X" stenciled onto the sidewalk nearby. — archidose.blogspot.com