A Philosophy Guide to Street Art and the Law

Abstract

What is the relationship between street art and the law? It is argued that street art has a constitutive relationship with the law. A crucial aspect of the identity of this urban art kind depends on its capacity to turn upside down dominant uses of public spaces. Street artists subvert those laws and social norms that regulate the city. It is shown that street art has not only transformed public spaces and their functions into artistic material, but has also turned its rebellious attitude toward the law into a creative resource. This essay aims at elucidating and arguing for this claim, while drawing important implications at the level of street art’s metaphysics, value, and relationship with rights of intellectual property, in particular copyright and moral rights. At the other end of the spectrum of contractual art, street art is outlaw art.

Current “street art” in the city of Bucharest

“…The need to introduce clear laws and rules arose because many artists use both public and private spaces as exhibition supports without the owner's consent or authorisation. The formal and informal rules applied at the level of a city regulate the visible in terms of what should be exposed or not (Baldini, 2018). There has always been a direct link between street art and illegality, its exposure becoming, in certain situations, incompatible with the way visual manifestation or appreciation of aesthetics is allowed in some cities (Chackal, 2016).…”

Cinematic street art? Exploring the limits of the philosophy of street art

“…Ask people interested in street art what they envision if you say "cinematic street art" and likely 5 The proposition that aconsensuality and illegality are individual is contentious. Baldini points out that the assumption is oxymoronic since aconsensuality conceptually implies de jure regulatory violations of a given space (Baldini [2018]: 14). Private property is designated in legal documents, so to produce an aconsensual artwork, which Bacharach says occurs on private property, entails that the artist violates the city's regulations for private property (Bacharach [2016]: 486).…”

“…Mutoscopes could similarly be installed in the street. The sceptic might also offer the concern that neither of these artworks are subversive, one of the vital characteristics of street art that Baldini (2018;2021) observes. Subjectivity plays a serious role in subversiveness.…”

Differentiating graffiti in Macao: activity types, multimodality and institutional appropriation

“…Early scholars noticed that gang graffiti were territorial markers (Ley and Cybriwsky, 1974). Constrained by this illegal beginning, graffiti are controversial and Baldini (2018: 4) even argues that street art has a ‘conflictual relationship with the law’. However, society needs graffiti ‘to occur in order to illustrate acceptable boundaries’ between public and private property (Schacter, 2008: 43).…”