Pics or it didn’t happen: The artwork formerly known as heritage in Google Street Art

Abstract

In 2014, Google announced a new initiative for its Cultural Institute. Called the Street Art Project, the online database was seen by many (Google included) as a continuation of the Google Art Project, in that it sought to make street art from around the world more easily accessible to interested audiences. The company acknowledged that such art was temporary, and that, by virtue of the artwork’s eventual disappearance, it would eventually become an important record of preservation for the practice. However, in its focus on the physical artwork, the project unwittingly highlights a problematic trend in street art’s protection as intangible heritage: one where its safeguard often becomes overpowered by the tangibility of its material elements. Exploring Google Street Art through the lens of Melbourne, a city that has long negotiated with street art and graffiti as forms of cultural heritage, this article outlines the consequences of such tangibility for the intangible artwork. It argues that any protection of intangible heritage requires a tacit acknowledgement of the subjectivity which surrounds its experience: those community reactions and responses whose wide variability help define that heritage as something intangible.

The Persistence of Life and Play in በርበረ [ber-be-re] Transcripts

“…. whose secret will disappear along with the memory of the older generation.” Debates over ingredients, suppliers, and best practices are elided by the exacting recipes shared by Hassan (2020) and Gebreyesus (2019), as they and other writer-editors elevate በርበረ ’s reproducibility at the expense of its social memory (Isaac, 2019). 11 In this formalized system of knowledge, the orality of what is unsaid becomes forgotten, replaced by the new rules enacted by በርበረ ’s colonization.…”

Buffing and buffering Blu: the societal performance of street art, heritage erasure and digital preservation in Berlin

“…It approaches 'heritage' primarily as an idea that is rooted in different, often competing, discourses and cultural processes (Smith 2006). As such, it recognises that different conceptualisations of heritage have been applied when addressing graffiti and street art ranging from those that consider these phenomena at heritage sites principally as forms of 'heritage crime' (see Grove and Thomas 2014) to those that address the re-evaluation of these phenomena as heritage, or in other words their 'heritagisation', either via official heritage designation, through alternative measures, or more generally in the opinion of specific groups of people (MacDowall 2006;Merrill 2011Merrill , 2015Burdick and Vicencio 2015;Nomeikaite 2017;Hansen 2018a;Isaac 2019).…”