Graffiti shifts from urban blight to urban chic
Graffiti shifts from urban blight to urban chic
SKAM sprays the Louis Vuitton store on Bloor Street West in Toronto.
Photograph by: Tom Sandler, Canwest News Service
It’s been sprayed on trains and scrawled across skyscrapers. This year, it was even splattered on Louis Vuitton handbags.
When, exactly, did graffiti get so glamorous?
Painters like Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Keith Haring (1958-1990) first brought graffiti into the avant-garde art world during the ’80s, though both passed away as their careers were launching.
Today, second generation vandals-turned-artists are earning critical respect and commercial success in the worlds of art and fashion in Canada and worldwide, leaving many hooligans with trickster smiles on their faces.
Stencils at Oslo Cityhall Gallery
Jan Olav Forberg, Stencils Oslo Cityhall Gallery
"OPPLEV LARVIK" Open to May 10. 2009
Blagojevich stencil appears in Chicago
Blagojevich art: Graffiti stencil of disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich appears around city
Evan McGinley makes a cell phone photo of a stenciled image of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in an alley just south of Washington Street between State Street and Wabash Avenue, across from Macy's in downtown Chicago. (Tribune photo by Phil Velasquez / April 30, 2009)
HaHa: Phat of the Land Exhibit
Regan HaHa Tamanui
Phat Of The Land
Exhibition dates: 30 April - 23 May 2009
Opening: Thursday, 30 April 6 - 8pm
Vandals Target Banksy Mural in Bristol
Graffiti Discussion on SF Radio
Ah. So much for not being an early riser. I missed the initial discusson on KQED about graff in SF.
Hopefully they'll post a mp3 of the talk soon here.
For now, ther's a discussion going on in the forum here.
Guess this is leading up to the "huddle" that's happening later today on Kearney St.
Still not sure if the huddle will spark anything new on the topic beyond "call police, paint over, call police."
NY Times: Fairey Not a Crook
Graphic Content | Shepard Fairey Is Not a Crook
By Steven Heller Here is the original post, with pics
Steven Heller, a former art director at The New York Times, is a co-chair of the MFA Design Department at the School of Visual Arts and a blogger and author.
Even before Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama “Hope” poster became the focus of legal and ethical scrutiny — for Fairey’s use of Mannie Garcia’s A.P. news photo as the basis of the now ubiquitous image — some design critics and practitioners had already questioned the street artist’s habit of “sampling” existing imagery. A scolding essay by Mark Vallen, entitled “Obey Plagiarist Fairey,” which was published online in 2007, accused Fairey, who created the “OBEY GIANT” project in 1989, of “expropriating and recontextualizing artworks of others.” The booty in this alleged thievery is primarily propaganda imagery from the 1920s (Russian Constructivism and Bolshevist posters) to the 1960s (Chinese Socialist Realism and counter-culture rock posters). However, Vallen’s harsh indictment seems not to have hurt Fairey’s reputation. If anything, the criticism enhances his subversive agenda, as it fosters debate about the line between influence and theft in art and design.