Eighteen years ago, I was born in the Bogota of illegal graffiti and of “el Cartucho.” My family looked down upon graffiti: we’re poor, but we’re not that poor. The presence of graffiti acted as a marker to the dangerous neighborhoods or as the leftovers of a violent student protest. I still remember walking by a municipal urban development building covered in spray paint – for all their poverty, graffiti artists and students were not lacking in irony. But that was eighteen years ago.
May 2015, I visited Los Angeles for the first time through the Stanford Arts Institute. On our last day in the city, we walked east of Little Tokyo to the Arts District. A tanned, graying man waited for us in front of an abandoned building covered in letters and sea creatures and colors. It would soon be torn down to match the rising apartment buildings on the other side of the road. This building marked the beginning of a lot of walking made worthwhile by both the art and our excellent guide who had been involved in graffiti for years. Admittedly, he rectified and expanded upon the haphazard conception I had of graffiti and street art. But before I put forth my two cents regarding street art’s encroachment on graffiti’s territory, I will rewind back to the time I first discovered street art.
I met Banksy at the end of my second year of high school. He consisted of a few slides at the end of my online Art History course. But for me, Banksy was a revelation of wit, activism, and “tasteful” graffiti. Just a few months ago, I visited Bogota for the first time in about a decade. Graffiti was still illegal, it was still there, and most of my family agreed that it greatly contributed to the city’s degradation. I was thus prompted to watch Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop. It proved a veritable introduction to a perhaps made-up French man’s life and his misadventures with the likes of Shepard Fairey and Space Invader. Little did I know that three years later I would be looking at one Shepard Fairey’s pieces in person and in a very different light.
Shepard Fairey's Peace Goddess by Sojourner Ahébée
In the world of graffiti, there exist different hierarchies and rules of etiquette. Dripping paint used to be a telltale sign of sloppy work and inexperience. But many things have changed with the surge of street art. I became aware of the social implications of gentrification throughout my Freshman year of college. I kept receiving emails of the displacement of Buena Vista residents in Palo Alto. I kept hearing about the rising prices around Silicon Valley. In the Bay Area, gentrification is our reality. And I discovered it is also the reality for graffiti artists in the LA Arts District.
Our guide talked about his past of poverty, gangs, and how he managed to overcome his situations through the spray can. His words clashed against our immediate surroundings: an indie coffee shop on one corner, fashionable and artsy people strolling down the streets. We keep walking, alternating between the street art from a French man and the anonymous bubble letters of a local graffiti artist. And in the bright sunlight it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that these two worlds are coexisting.
Street art selectively consumes graffiti. It adopts graffiti’s “edge” and “risk” while catering to refinement and common taste. It adopts an urban "flavor" while foregoing graffiti’s complex history of poverty and oppression. It even claims to adopt graffiti’s function of social criticism while crowding out the oppressed from their homes. I won’t deny that street art and murals can be pretty and witty and skillfully made. But all the problems with street art can be observed with the demographics of the artists. Banksy and Shepard Fairey are white, male, and not badly off. Why is that art on the streets doesn't get recognition until white people appropriate it? Street art has not only become mainstream, but has also become capitalistic. During our tour, a street artist stopped us to take a picture with us for social media. With its trappings of privilege and wealth, street art necessarily rejects graffiti.
I realize it’s not as simple as condemning street art and championing graffiti. Part of graffiti’s legacy involves sexism and violence. Staring at a graffiti piece of a half-naked woman posed for the male gaze made me very uncomfortable. But it's precisely because of that discomfort that we need to discuss these issues. To generalize all street art or all graffiti is reductionist, as they are both very diverse art forms. But it is important to acknowledge how street art is appropriating graffiti in America and making it palatable to a population of privilege.
Today, graffiti and street art are legal in Bogota. People all over the world travel there to see the two art forms battling it out on the streets. But in America, as people line up to see Banksy’s works in New York, Miami Beach police tase and kill a Colombian teen with a spray can.
