The demographics are different now. Most graffiti artists of the 1980s, Keith Haring aside, ultimately flopped as commercial painters because context is everything. A subway car is not a living room.
Failure derived from a lack of private initiative and visual sense, not from anything to do with making public art, which during the 1980s art market craze was, despite the blight of many public spaces by graffiti and the criminal act itself, a useful counterpoint to all the lunacy of spending and hype.
Does street art gentrify neighborhoods? Graffiti didn't gentrify SoHo. Wall Street did. It didn't gentrify subways. From West Philadelphia to East Los Angeles, much of the best street painting is in poor neighborhoods that have resisted change. It's hard to feel sympathetic with vandals splashing paint on posters or stenciled pictures, notwithstanding that some of the splashes look kind of aesthetic.
All that said, public space and civic justice are difficult issues to which the brouhaha returns our attention. New York neighborhoods are indeed changing, not all for the better, as the city becomes more affluent and homogeneous, and art shouldn't exist in it simply as a symbol of wealth and privilege. It should seize public spaces where it can, to make itself more part of daily life, more relevant in the world, and to become a source of serendipity, pleasure, trouble, controversy and interest to people outside the art world, not just inside it.
Minus the incendiary devices, this latest little flap is proof that art can still matter.
RSS