Transgression Will Be Punished

THE REAL POWER OF STREET ART, AKA JOIN THE REVOLUTION

THIS SERIES OF ARTICLES, LIKE STREET ART ITSELF, sets out to explore those grand historical narratives that, until recently, contemporary art has been in retreat from, themes exploring issues of politics, justice, power, history and capitalism, a word that we hear less and less of in art as it is replaced with the ideology of a visual culture in cahoots with neoliberal economics. Paradoxically, street art, at its best, lets call it critical street art, is a recognition that culture is not always a medium of power, but also a mode of resistance to it. Something those financing the fashionable shift to banal monolithic muralism, marketed as street art, would do well to remember.

What started as a peripheral trend for a material and artistic use of public space by self-taught artists, armed with cans, markers, stencils, paste-ups and stickers, has quickly developed into a truly global democratic and egalitarian movement of visual art practice capable of rocking governments. Whilst contemporary art was slowly slipping into a self-induced VIP coma of extreme fetishised consumerism, the disruptive and subversive potential that street art offered became more and more relevant to a public starved of both political and visual representation.