Where did you go street art?

08 Jun 2009 / 4 Comments

mia

I can’t think of a better city than NYC to spend as much time walking as possible. There’s too many obvious reasons for me to list here except to say it’s pretty hard not to walk a block and not find something interesting to look at, and in most cases be inspired by. Street art used to be a big part of that for me. The common cliches of finding and seeing stuff in obscure corners as a daily exploration used to abound. I’d take pictures and post it to flickr etc. Funny or perhaps more sadly is that I’m not doing that nearly as much at the moment. What happened? It’s really sterile at the moment. For all I know there could be a great movement going on one block past were I usually walk, but I don’t think that’s the case. On the flip side there’s a lot of chatter about street art online as I’ve noticed with this page I created to collect all Street Art News, but my reality as I walk back and forth around the city (and occasionally Brooklyn) is that there isn’t much to note because there’s nothing to see. It’s blank. Could it be that people are focusing more on gallery work (which is fine if that was the goal in the first place), maybe it’s a reflection that people don’t really feel inspired at the moment due to the economy? Are people focusing more on twitter to get their message out? It’s just a guess on my part but I’m getting kind of tired of not seeing anything at the moment.

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Posted in: Design, Street Art
  • painkillas

    street art is graffiti, right?

    and graffiti is just a symptom of crime and poverty. i wouldn't want to see that.

  • http://designnotes.info/ michaelsurtees

    That's one way to look at it, a view that I don't share but I don't live in your neighbourhood…

  • http://www.mollybob.wordpress.com/ Mollybob

    I've noticed this is Sydney, Australia too. I used to walk around taking alot of photos, but ther hasn't been much around for the past few months… maybe it's got something to do with the global mood?

    oh, re: painkillas: I see streetart as a creative expression. it makes inner city living more vibrant. I guess there are many perspectives though.

  • http://www.decheser.net/ David DeCheser

    I too am a fan of street art – while not an expert, there's a few thoughts I have on this.

    First, there's is a sort of code of conduct where artists shouldn't cover up another artist's work. There's a wall on N 5th St in Williamsburg that has some work by FAILE. This work has been there for at least a year.

    Another aspect is where's the audience you're trying to reach. When I moved to Willaimsburg over 10 years ago there wasn't much street art. When I moved out about 4 years ago, there was much much more and it had also spread further out. More artists were living in the area. Other artists from afar were posting in that area because they wanted to be seen by this audience. And work spread radially as rents went up. I was back in the neighborhood a few weeks ago and I found that certain areas were totally blanketed: http://bit.ly/hiAL6

    Having recently moved out to Jersey City, I've noticed the growth of street art (including graffiti) as the art and hipster crowd has grown.

    Wooster Collective has an interesting thread about this on their Facebook page: http://bit.ly/MthKD

    As @painkillas noted, there's also not a common agreement on what street art is. Wooster also has an interesting thread there too: http://bit.ly/wn5mc

    btw: I like what you've done with Street Art News