Walls Are The People's Canvas

How Street Art Can Be a Public Forum

- Martyn Reed

I seem to have been involved with “walls” all my life, both the literal and metaphorical. How I ended up curating them instead of behind them, I’m not quite sure, but they always seemed to represent a challenge, and I like a challenge. This is a little story about walls, boundaries and fences and how they’ve impacted my life thus far.

I’ve been working on a theory recently about how the professional cultural class working in institutions have, like cultural bureaucrats in public art before them, started stripping visual art of any real subversive potential, its teeth and claws, primarily, I think, in fear that it may get hungry and turn on them. Can there be any other genuine reason for the art establishment waiting until our heroes are dead before granting them access to the hallowed halls of fame? Basquiat’s debut London show Boom For Real took place just last year, and shortly after, an expo on Rammellzee surfaced. Do we have to wait for the likes of Futura and Saber to shuffle from this mortal coil before gaining recognition?

Here in Norway, curator and head of the art fund for the Norwegian Arts council, Geir Haraldseth, went out hard in Art in America against Nuart’s practice and street art in general. Situating it sneeringly alongside developments in “urban fashion” and demographically alongside local Porsche Cayenne devotees. He created a carefully crafted comic book caricature of Frankfurt School thinking, a spectacle of bad taste was washing through the city and you better watch out. The article won him plaudits amongst the local art set and led shortly after to the announcement that Nuart’s government funding was to be “phased out.”