Check this: reader Mission Mistaken was just in Paris and stumbled across this museum featuring an installation of graffiti as pop art. Nothing really shocking here, but it is another check in the column of legitimizing graffiti as an art form.
I was just in Paris and the Cartier Foundation Museum (yes, as in tank watches & diamonds) featured a comprehensive show on the history of graffiti as pop art. But being French they couldn’t just settle for a tame treatment. Rather, everything was game for a coating of spray paint. The building exterior, even the basement corridors and the bathrooms.
Is that art?
No, it’s what happens when someone takes a sh1t all over the walls..
Let’s stay in the Mission!
Art who?
I’m no graffiti artist, but that’s some shitty ass graffiti art compared to american standards. At least here on our shores you run into some interesting pictures or messages every once in a while.
Hey guys, I think that the consideration of tagging as an art-form is the whole point. If they put up pretty murals then it would probably be a boring exhibit because everybody acknowedges already that graffiti muruals are, in fact, art. Tagging has its own particular beauty and function – as an assertion of identity and as a form of rebellion. I think that this exhibit is beautiful and vibrant and alive. I wish we had something like this at SFMOMA.
Whatever. It still looks like a bathhouse.
Note the bottom pic — that was an in-gallery non-stop live graffiti demo. The set piece is a billboard with billboard stuff, then each tagger can peal away layers and/or add paint as he or she sees fit. Note the BRAND of billboard. Clear channel. They have the money for this but not SF bike sharing, evidently.