Power relations on the walls – the alchemy of street art

Abstract

Labelled as deviant at first, street art has become an indispensable phenomenon of trendy cities over its half a century history. Originating in graffitis of New York in the 1970’s, street art was associated with the discourse of fear and chaos by the media and the government. Law enforcement applied zero tolerance against graffiti writers to symbolically secure the power of local authorities. Nowadays, different forms of high street art have become effective tools of deliberate placemaking in large cities around the world. Today ‘good’ urban art belongs to the canon of fine arts, and means more profit for property owners in gentrified neighbourhoods . At the same time, ’bad’ street art is still a crime and there is no ‘proper’ place for it within the city. Due to these trends, several disciplines – including urban studies, cultural studies, art history, sociology, psychology, criminology and critical geography – have turned to the study of street art in their research agenda. While in Hungary research on street art has been limited, a number of studies have been published on the topic in international scientific journals since the 2000’s. Most of the above mentioned researches analyze street art in the context of social theories, describing the production, the perception and the usage of the urban spaces based on the concepts of Henri Lefebre, Edward Soja and David Harvey. This paper aims to provide a succinct summary of the literature that radically transformed relations between street art and power. The paper does not aim to present a synthetizing history of street art, nor the variety of its forms. It does not clarify the relationship between street art and graffiti. Neither does it clarify whether street art is the collecting definition of art forms on the streets or graffiti can be called as art. It discusses views on the city as a representation of power and as space of resistance, and presents the historical background and the changing role of street art – including graffiti and sticker art –in place-making. The analysis reveals the way an illegal, criminal activity has become a tool in urban policy, losing its original functions of spaces of resistance against commodification.