Visual Inquiry - Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2020

This article considers how the monetization of the street art world is affecting the ecosystem of expressions found in the street. It takes as a point of departure that a central quality of street art is its potential to turn public space into a site of exploration. What is meant by this, briefly, is that the presence of ephemeral street art can motivate people to explore their surroundings and perhaps question how public space is being used and how they want it to be used. This article argues that the ongoing monetization of the street art world may lead to the fossilization of urban public space – a situation where the otherwise constant flux of visual expressions in the street may come to a halt as the growing presence of sanctioned work, along with potential financial interests in placating facilitators of such work, means that fewer spaces are available for unsanctioned interventions. This fossilization of urban public space can negatively impact street-based art’s potential to influence how we think about our environs, as well as the possibilities for emerging artists to hone their skills in the street without curatorial restrictions.

Meanings and functions of street art have, in recent decades, diversified in the United States as well as globally. Today, we find street art initiatives and mural festivals in many cities, where they are applauded for fostering local development and tourism while also producing less tangible branding and marketing outcomes. Our research, based on ethnographic fieldwork and secondary data analysis in three Florida cities, suggests that street art initiatives can indeed become, in essence, handmaids to real estate development; however, the degree to which this is the case is variable, and it is by no means inevitable that the only long-term outcome will be the cultural obliteration and physical displacement of current residents. The article’s analysis describes and compares mural scenes in key redeveloping neighbourhoods in three Florida cities (Tampa, St. Petersburg and Miami) that, we argue, represent a diversity, and perhaps even a trajectory, of cities’ appropriation of street art as a development tool.

Whereas subcultures such as punk, metal, skate, goth and emo have all been the target of moral panics in the past, the conditions that sparked these moral panics have since become banal and normalized, in line with Stanley Cohen’s claim that moral panics per definition tend to be short-lived. The moral panic about subcultural graffiti in Sweden, however, has proved remarkably consistent. Drawing from contemporary work on moral panics as extreme forms of more mundane moral regulations, this article deals with graffiti as mal placé in relation to both urban space and romanticized conceptions of youth resistance, rendering it not only a suitable enemy for moral entrepreneurs but also a reliable source of income for surveillance and graffiti-removal firms. Whereas the previous subcultural research has discussed moral panics as a first step of the commodification of the subcultural (Williams 2011), the authors use the example of graffiti in Stockholm to point to a commodification, not so much of subcultural style, but of the moral panic itself.

Review of: Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture, Stefano Bloch (2020)

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 240 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-22649-358-9, p/bk, $11.49