Speculating on (the) urban (of) art: (un)siting street art in the age of neoliberal urbanisation

Abstract

This paper addresses the current co-optation of street art into an uncritical aesthetic supplement to the process of neoliberal urbanisation, by focusing on its unresolved relation with its own site. This is done in three steps. First, via a perambulating immersion into the complexity of a specific site. Second, via a critical engagement with the form and politics of contemporary street art. Third, via a strategic speculation on the relation between the notions of art, urban and site. Street art’s current impasse, I argue, paradoxically depends on its incapacity to become properly urban. A urban-specific street art, I contend, is not a decorative veneer nor an enchanting disruption to dramatic processes of urbanisation: it is a force-field in which these processes are made visible, experienceable, and thus called into question. The ‘Olympic’ works of JR and Kobra in Rio de Janeiro, and the iconoclastic performance by Blu in Berlin, are used to illustrate and complement the argument.

Public Strategies for the Promotion of Urban Art: The Lisbon Metropolitan Area Case

“…The first note is the importance that UA can have for the touristic and economic development of a city, in particular the postindustrial ones, or for cultural dynamism and improvement of public spaces (Cameron and Coaffee 2005; De-Miguel-Molina et al 2013; Jazdzewska 2018; Mokras-Grabowska 2014). The latter point to the processes of gentrification and property speculation, the instrumentalization and domestication of those arts, and their subordination to the taste of the masses and to an economist logic (Brighenti 2016; Evans 2009, 2016; Pavoni 2019; Quinn 2005; Romero 2018; Schacter 2014; Trubina 2018; Wang 2009). This perspective emphasizes how these arts benefit a neoliberal model of development that, far from promoting inclusion and democratic access to the city and the cultural and artistic assets, perpetuates instead several types of asymmetries (Bengtsen 2013; Evans 2009; Sacco et al 2019; Trubina 2018).…”

“…Banksy, JR, Shepard Fairey, Kobra, or Vhils have become not only symbols of a generation but also a signifier for a new type of city: global, competitive, entrepreneurial, glamorous, and creative. This is the corollary of a range of sociocultural processes linked to the commodification, co-optation, artification, and institutionalization of graffiti and street art that have been researched by several authors (Brighenti 2016; Campos 2015; Evans 2016; Kramer 2010; Pavoni 2019; Ross, Lennon, and Kramer 2020; Schacter 2014; Snyder 2009). These dynamics result in pushing these expressions into the cultural mainstream and, consequently, to a higher degree of social acceptance.…”

“…Investing on UA, ultimately, corresponds to a paradigm where the arts and culture are understood as resources for urban development and city marketing (Guinard and Margier 2018;Marques and Richards 2014;Sacco et al 2019;Zebracki 2018). In this context, an increasingly relevant line of inquiry focuses on the instrumentalization of UA for the benefit of specific strategies of urban development and planning (Grondeau and Pondaven 2018;Guinard, Jacquot, and Kullmann 2018;Pavoni 2019;Raposo 2019;Salomone 2018). The benefits of such ventures have been widely noted.…”

“…However, not everything around this issue is seen in a positive light. More critical voices have been revealing a different reality where UA is associated to gentrification, urban speculation, and touristification integrated in a neoliberal agenda of urban development inspired by the model of the creative city (Andron 2018;Brighenti 2016;Evans 2016;Pavoni 2019;Young 2014).…”

Editorial1

“…A arte urbana é, por isso, uma categoria não apenas recente, mas também envolta em ambivalências várias e sujeita a múltiplos debates. São diversas as tensões e polaridades que atravessam a arte urbana contemporânea: entre a rua e a galeria, entre o formal e o informal, entre o espontâneo e o comissionado, entre o profissional e o amador (Bengtsen, 2014;Campos & Sequeira, 2018, 2019Sequeira, 2016;Schacter, 2014).…”