What Is Street Art? From Vandalism to the Auction House

The modern form begins in Philadelphia and New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s with writing rather than pictures. The practice was tagging, repeatedly writing a personal name in a distinctive style across as much of the city as possible, and the motivation was recognition among other writers rather than any public audience. A Manhattan teenager who wrote Taki 183, after his name and street, was profiled by the New York Times in 1971, and the coverage spread the practice enormously. Subway trains were the preferred surface because they carried the name across the whole city, and styles escalated from simple tags to elaborate multicoloured pieces covering entire cars, with a developed vocabulary, hierarchy and set of rules about who may paint over whom. New York spent enormous sums removing it, and by 1989 had cleaned the entire subway fleet, which pushed writers onto walls and eventually into galleries and design.

Practitioners and critics separate two overlapping traditions, and the distinction matters to the people involved more than to the public:

• •Graffiti writing is letter-based, addressed primarily to other writers, and concerned with style, placement and reputation within a subculture
• •Street art is image-based, addressed to the general public, and typically legible without any subcultural knowledge
• •Street art arrived later, from the 1980s, drawing on advertising, punk graphics and the poster, with Blek le Rat in Paris pioneering the stencil and Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat moving between street and gallery in New York
• •Techniques diverged: stencils, wheatpasted paper, stickers, mosaics, yarn, projections and installations, most of which are faster to apply than a painted piece and therefore lower risk
• •Many writers regard street art as a softer commercial derivative, and many street artists came out of writing, so the boundary is contested from both directions

Work made on a wall in the street has no obvious owner, no edition, no provenance and no way of being delivered to a buyer, and the market solved each of those in ways that sit awkwardly with the form. Walls have been physically removed and sold at auction, sometimes against the stated wishes of the artist, and the practice generated a series of disputes about whether a work on a building belongs to the building's owner. Artists responded by producing studio work, prints and editions for sale while continuing to work outside, which is the model Banksy's operation uses, with an authentication body issuing certificates for saleable works and explicitly declining to authenticate street pieces. The most pointed commentary on the whole arrangement came from Banksy himself in 2018, when a framed canvas shredded itself partway through immediately after selling at auction for over a million pounds, an act which roughly tripled the work's value.

Unauthorised painting is criminal damage in essentially every jurisdiction, and the penalties can be severe, with custodial sentences imposed in several countries and prosecutions occasionally aggregating years of work into a single large claim. The interesting legal development runs the other way. Copyright protects original artistic work regardless of whether it was made legally, and artists have successfully sued companies for reproducing their street work in advertising and clothing without permission. In the United States, the Visual Artists Rights Act protects works of recognised stature from destruction, and in 2018 a court awarded 6.75 million dollars to twenty-one artists whose murals at the 5Pointz complex in New York had been whitewashed overnight by the building's owner before demolition, a judgment upheld on appeal. That case established that a legally authorised mural can acquire protection against the wishes of the person who owns the wall, which is close to the opposite of the form's original legal position.

The most uncomfortable part of the story is the relationship with property values. Areas known for street art become destinations, which raises rents, which displaces the populations and the artists that made the area interesting, a process visible in Wynwood in Miami, Shoreditch in London, Kreuzberg in Berlin and dozens of others. Councils and developers now commission murals deliberately as a placemaking tool, and festivals invite international artists to paint legal walls, which produces a great deal of accomplished work and removes the two things the form began with, namely the illegality and the lack of permission. The critical literature calls this the paradox of the form: its value derives from a subversive position that is destroyed by being valued. What remains, and is not nothing, is a tradition of putting images in public without asking, which continues wherever the commissioned murals are not, and which is the part that keeps being painted over.

The practice began as name-writing in Philadelphia and New York around 1970, aimed at other writers rather than the public, and image-based street art followed from the 1980s using stencils, paste-ups and stickers for a general audience. The market solved the problem of selling unsellable work through studio editions, prints and occasionally by cutting walls out of buildings. Copyright protects illegally made work, an American statute has protected murals against the wall's owner, and the form's success reliably raises rents and displaces the areas that produced it.