# can street art survive modern capitalism?

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** oliSUNvia
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlSeGF8e7uQ
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/41106

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

my if you walk around Toronto chances are you'll run into some pretty cool street art appealing street art seems to be a shared feature of hip Urban cities from Toronto to LA to New York City when I visited Berlin this past may I was so excited to see the city arguably most known for street art and leftist punk Spirit when the Berlin Wall fell berliners relished in the spatial freedom and Mobility that was once lost to reclaim their City and exercise spatial Freedom berliners were putting graffiti everywhere graffiti on trains on Bridges bathrooms are covered with death to Fascism stickers having the agency to use their City space the way they wanted was valuable so when I came across an Uber venue right next to the famous Eastside Gallery it probably would have made a punk Berliner in the80s puke as I explored more of Berlin it was becoming apparent that as the city grew and became more attractive to foreign investors the government began to co-op street art for commercial purposes formerly Berlin has strict laws against graffiti claiming that they may even imprison graffiti artists for 2 years but in practice it's well known by artists that these laws are rarely taken seriously because graffiti is seen as essential to the urban culture Berlin sells for profit and uses to craft a punk City brand once a symbol of counterculture street art and graffiti can now be used to promote luxury brands or big corporations attract tourists like myself and increase the cost of housing in certain hip and alternative areas ironically this drove out local artists who could no longer afford to live in so-called artsy areas the East Side Gallery is on Prime real estate with a view of the river that's made it very attractive to developers on my trip I learned that local Berlin artists don't even like the East Side Gallery it's considered a shallow apolitical piece of art that's commissioned by the government for tourism and government controlled it is when some of the artists on the east side Gallery refused to touch up their murals in 2008 the government simply covered up their worker when I came back to Toronto I started noticing lots of similarities in the development of street art here I walked all over Toronto paying close attention to street art from large professional murals to tags and scrolled messages on concrete walls how did street art become so mainstream graffiti writing in New York is a vocation its Traditions are handed down from one youthful generation to the next to some it's art to most people however it is a play that never ends a symbol that we've lost control when we talk about street art there's debate around how to define the term for our purposes we will be talking about contemporary street art which comes from what is classified as hip hop graffiti a kind of writing that emerged in the post Civil Rights era of the United States pioneered by mostly African-American and Latino youth living in Philadelphia and the Bronx in the mid 1960s for most of History graffiti ref refer to things like cave paintings and hieroglyphics scratches or drawings on a Surface but because of hip-hop graffiti is now associated with aerosol on freight trains gang tags and Declarations of Love on bathroom stalls a lot of street art has since taken hip-hop graffiti and merged it with Fine Art techniques so that it sits between low brow and highbrow art I got into street art I was originally a fine artist I trained at ocad which is only a few blocks of away from here as a fine

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

artist I really wasn't even really aware of street art to begin with and I started doing these commercial murals and for many years I made a strong mental distinction between my own personal work which I showed in Galleries and the commercial art that I was being paid to do and now I don't really make that much of a distinction there's a little bit of that kind of Outlaw transgressive aspect to street art which was once there in Fine Art and I don't really feel as there that much anymore to be honest I I'd make the distinction between uh tagging and graffiti and then street art it seems like graffiti is sort of its own art form and then what I'm doing here is more of a kind of a mural art but a tagging as far as I know at least in Toronto seems to be a kind of a territorial Urban game where someone will do a tag and then someone will over tag it something like that in America in the bigger cities is sort of associated with gang activity it's a way of sort of retaking public space so the definition of contemporary street art is significantly related to Graffiti and politics for those who think graffiti is a form of Art Street Art will be an umbrella category that encompasses more specific forms of street art such as installations murals and graffiti other times street art is used to refer only to clean and Polished Urban art to separate it from graffiti to emphasize that the former counts as art and the latter is unwanted vandalism they don't have anything better to do if you like art then go to art school and become an artist to understand what street art means today it's important to understand the cultural and political significance of graffiti if a big city currently promotes their thriving street art culture chances are that city has tried to shut down that art before when contemporary street art began hitting Urban cities in the 1970s Elites and politicians were real ticked off to say the least they did not like seeing people treat public or corporate property as their own Sketchbook I'm detective Bernie Jacobs I in conjunction with my partner detective Jim McHugh with the crime prevention coordinators for the New York City Transit Police Department I will show you graffiti such as the letters on the end of that car directly in back of me is that an odd form I don't know I'm not an odd critic but I can sure as hell tell you that that's a crime graffiti culture directly challenged capitalism's top down style of control Street artists refused used to be passive consumers or Spectators of their own City they wanted to play an active role in negotiating their Collective identity as members of a certain space the wall of a house is a space that belongs to the eyes of the person looking at it in this sense it's a public space when we stick up that particular poem on that particular house we're not thinking of who's living there who probably will never read that poem because he lives behind it we're interested in those who will see it with their eyes the architectural genotypes of the streets house facades are public property so why are they private property in the ' 80s and '90s policing became heavily influenced by the broken windows theory proposed by James Q Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 the theory claim that visible signs of disorder would lead to Serious acts of crime by seeing a broken window it makes people more inclined to commit violent robberies themselves under broken windows policing then cops were encouraged to treat minor property crimes like Petty vandalism as a gateway to violent crime this meant that there wasn't a huge difference between street art and graffiti at the time because the police and government hated them both what they cared about was keeping the walls of their precious property clean they didn't care if it was a mural or a graffiti tag New York City had a particularly tough Crackdown on graffiti this is really funny because now hip NYC neighborhoods with street art have seen its property prices increase by 10 to 15% in 1995 gulan established the anti-graffiti task force to increase law enforcement around graffiti and in 1999 his office helped lead an effort known as graffiti free NYC it allowed Property Owners to report illegal street art via a city hotline or fill out a forever graffiti free form to give the city consent to clean their property some people think vandalizing ta property is fun costly vandalizing ta property is illegal now I can't ignore the racial relations this was situated in remember how when the Berlin Wall fell berliners used graffiti to reclaim space and exercise their spatial Freedom well the' 60s and70s were politically charged

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

times for America racial segregation had just been recently outlawed Western capitalism was facing widespread opposition second W feminism was gaining strength tons of new migrants were entering America marginalized voices were growing louder and were seeking expression through street art since marginalized groups faced systemic barriers to holding positions of power they took their counterculture messages to streets and walls graffiti was a way of rejecting a top- down Society where a select group at the top held all the authority instead the people on the ground wanted their voices heard and wanted to leave their mark on their Community graffiti became a form of political often leftist expression because a decent chunk of Street artists were black or brown folk or were poor when the police began cracking down on graffiti it only contributed to the rapidly growing race and class disparities in jail you know it's helpful to note that this war on graffiti took place during the same period as the War on Drugs where racialized individuals often black were deliberately overp policed arrested and charged with more severe consequences than their white counterparts graffiti was once a countercultural threat that conservative forces rounded maligned as a racially coded stand in for urban delinquency at this point someone might go well gangs do graffiti and gangs are violent and dangerous so graffiti is a good indicator of violent crime eh actually the correlation between graffiti and violence has been studied a lot and there is no statistical evidence that Simply Having graffiti in a neighborhood including gang graffiti causes more violence but even if that were true most of the graffiti in a city are not gang tags and even if we only focus on tagging where was the evidence that most tags belong to gangs if they were done by gangs why does the majority of graffiti concentrate around art schools in hipster districts in the 1990s as more college educated students moved from the suburbs to the city many of them deliberately lived around graffiti heavy neighborhoods because that was the authentic Urban vibe there have been many incidents in the government and police including High ranked agencies like the LAPD or FBI where they mistakenly use photos of hipop style tags on their website or reports and mislabel them as gang graffiti it's embarrassing how bad they are at their job I'm a muralist I'm an artist like this is my entrepreneurship this is my life you know and they stopped that day from me man Detroit well-known muralist chiefy McFly overcome with emotions after he was cuffed and arrested by two police officers while working on a project commissioned by the city McFly says he was racially profiled it's worth making a side note here that graffiti is not just a contemporary phenomenon it's been around since the ancient times a comparison of how ancient European graffiti is treated versus modern hip-hop graffiti brings out the racist undertones in current opinions several historians note that when ancient Greek Roman or Coptic tourists visited Egyptian sites and left graffiti on Egyptian buildings the graffiti was preserved and studied as valuable historical artifact today the 19th century graffiti written by Lord Byron on the classical greek temple of Poseidon in Athens is considered a tourist attraction however in 2013 when a Chinese tourist wrote his name on an Egyptian Temple at luxer news outlets were pressed and social media ripped him to shreds for ruining the monument a lot of the media coverage used negative ethnic stereotypes portraying Chinese people as uncivilized and lacking quality and breeding as if Western tourists never engaged in such Behavior why are Ancient Graffiti preserved and studied but their modern equivalence at ancient sites erased and vilified something to think about huge skyscrapers and condos everywhere luxury stores left and right super expensive bougie restaurants now Toronto's government has had a shorter but also passionate Feud with graffiti a neighborhood called Yorkville used to be the center of the art scene can you believe this used to be the art scene of Toronto clearly something has changed well when the city built the Blan for subway line or line two as most people now call it the neighborhood's property cost started to increase and graffiti started to no longer be compatible with the more wealthy aesthetic of the neighborhood artists can no longer afford to live here so they migrated towards Queen Street West then as Queen Street West got gentrified the art SC moved even further east to Riverdale and Regent Park you may know Rob Ford our previous mayor from his cocaine days well his brother Doug Ford is our current Premier of Ontario and I'm not so fond

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

of his Thanos looking ass either move forward but not coming from the government per se the premier it's coming from the health sector holy Christ now Rob Ford declared a war on graffiti and spent $400,000 in one year to get rid of street art because it didn't match his aesthetic Rob Ford is a clean girl he came can't handle looking to alt or grungy with anti-graffiti policies like these graffiti artists were historically Anonymous they weren't making money off of their craft at least not legally or stably and they expected their art to be temporary a mural could last a week before law enforcement or businesses would cover it up it could last only a few hours street art required spontaneity since graffiti artists had to be vigilant about not being caught by the police they had to be ready to flee from their art at any moment interestingly then the concept of being finished was not as important to a lot of street art unlike traditional artwork such as paintings and sculptures preservation was not the goal instead street art aimed to be integrated with everyday life sometimes they get covered up by trees or branches as the seasons change icicles might freeze on top of the graffiti creating new texture rain might change the paint colors a mural feels different depending on whether there are lots of people walking by or only one person street art is Living Art guys I have something to confess I'm a Microsoft Edge user which means I sometimes look at Bing for news I know it's the literal beta of web browsers but I used it once and I'm a loyal gal I consider myself an edger but it's definitely not the best place to get my news history made at us box office over Thanksgiving weekend 2019 Trump greets Justin Trudeau at the White House do whatever you want in this Game of Thrones Game it was time I switched to something else how convenient that the sponsor of this video is ground news is an app and website that gathers related articles from more than 50,000 sources across the world and political Spectrum in one place so you can compare how different Outlets cover the same story they've got way more specific topics you can follow than your ordinary news source for example I followed gentrification for this video and I found this story on Chinatown activists in Philadelphia you can see that there have been 30 Outlets that reported on this story and all of them can be accessed within ground news then if you check under the bias distribution heading you can see 24% of the sources lean left and 76% lean Center so let's compare a left and Center headline the left leaning headline reads in Philadelphia Chinatown activists rally again to stop development this time it's a 76ers Arena the center headline reads Philadelphia's Chinatown rallies against development of new 76ers Arena the difference is very small but you can see one headline explicitly mentioned activists being the ones rallying whereas the other vaguely mentions Chinatown as a whole this headline also says they are rallying again telling us gentrification is a repeated concern while the other headline makes the rally sound like an isolated event having ground news compile all these sources in one place has been super helpful for checking bias and practicing media literacy skills and you should too visit ground. news/ Allis sunia or scan my QR code to subscribe today you can sign up now to get 40% off the same Vantage plan I use that's ground. news/ Alis sunia or scan the QR code wherever it is on screen if we want to talk in art terms for a second graffiti is lowkey postmodern modernism was like yeah art and life are separate artistic significance is just in a work's aesthetic and formal properties stop trying to dissect the art for political messages or metaphors or social representation modernism was the OG it's not that deep Bro then pop artists like Andy Warhol came along and we like look at these boxes now look at these other boxes why do my boxes belong in a museum as art but those ones don't boom artistic significance is not just aesthetic and formal properties # art is life so pop art was postmodern by allowing everyday objects and events to enter museums Galleries and art critic discourse but street art flipped this around street art was postmodern by letting the art enter everyday life street art challenged everything about

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

the art World art goes into museums and galleries to be preserved but Street artists gave up any private ownership of their work once they put it on a street it belonged to the world most street art is erased by nature or interfered with by other people and those everyday interactions are all part of the art museums Place great importance on finding the origin of a work of art street art is anonymous and thus fights against constructing Grand narratives the art world is home to Rich Elites whereas Street artists are thinking about community members and everyday passerbys Art became a surprise rather than an object we intentionally seek out in some Gallery street art surprises us out of our passive spectator role and lets us actively engage with our surroundings street art had always been the exact opposite to private property it was okay that the art might be short-lived because it belonged to the public and natural world however as the law continued to chase down street artists Street art culture became harder to sustain thus to preserve their ways of art artists began to do street art differently to avoid being chased down by police officers some artists arranged agreements with property owners who would let them use their property as a canvas during this time businesses also became more willing to have street art on their buildings because commercial advertising began using Billboards and posters which look similar to street art hey it's not open this is me right yeah I was reading research and actually people were writing about how contemporary street art seem to foreshadow um Modern Advertising like just having these big pictures and texts everywhere on the streets on our buildings um and so advertising really cofy street art in a lot of way that's so true yeah it's kind of hard to put any political messaging into um streetart do you find that to be true or do you not really have experience with that it can be true cuz you're commissioned by the people who are who doesn't want to see like certain images or certain propaganda do you think street artti is able to like maintain you know the same kind of essence and goals it had before or uh I don't know if it's natural I think it's it maybe inevitable mhm I think it's part of uh like a larger Trends in culture where Urban culture absorbed into you know these kinds of corporate values I remember one street artist I'm not going to be able to quote him by name but he said like you know that's not like you know we're being force-fed all this visual information all this corporate branding and stuff in the end uh you know there's always going to be a lot more corporate imagery than there ever is street art anyway to ensure that the street artists would not hurt the property owner's business or reputation artists often had to dial back on the rebellious grungy nature of their style and also avoid political messages the art form metamorphosized with graffiti once known for its hurried look overy shoulder throw-ups merging with a nent genre of street art the less nefarious mural these less nefarious murals are all over Toronto now thanks to the Start program the city launched in 2012 it may seem like a total 180 from Toronto's previous anti graffiti approach but honestly it's just the same goals but hidden underneath in if you can't beat them join a mindset according to the Start program website one of the primary goals is still to get rid of graffiti but instead of getting rid of street art as a whole they'll support good street art projects that make a positive impact on the community and get rid of the bad ones so I got to ask what does good street art mean well now that street artists are more reliant on property owners good largely means abiding by private property interests and being a political the government also talks about improving the city's well-being and promoting positive feelings of community though it's not clear to me why we only get these effects if the government regulates street art oh wait it's because they care about certain community members at the expense of others to be fair the government probably had good liberal intentions to make everyone happy but that sort of makes them like HR saying why can't we all just get along I know you're upset that you still need to rely on food banks and that we're giving more funding to the police and education but you can discuss those problems at home or call us even though we'll never answer the phone just try not to express those problems outside when other people see it it's going to make them feel bad there was one street artist I reached out to who did not want to be interviewed because they believed that voicing their true opinions could cost them their job I don't know if I want to

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00]

put my real opinions out there as it could negatively impact my chances of getting funding off the record I feel like the city of Toronto has drained street art of almost all potential value in the ways other big cities have not Doug Ford apparently gets paid by the graffiti removal people it's all a sick game I wish there were better ways for artists to survive but unfortunately I have to play this game like every other artist government monopolizes the process and S sanitizes the art so it's safe lacks meaning lacks political advocacy makes it an administrative game of bylaws and Grant applications one of the few places in Toronto where graffiti is legal is graffiti alley which is unsurprisingly also a tourist attraction businesses don't have to worry about getting vandalized because graffiti artists now have this designated area to play along with W's across the board am I right Chad perhaps some W's but this is a huge transformation of how contemporary street art has functioned graffiti is not supposed to have physical boundaries nor aim at preservation graffiti is supposed to integrate art into the world in that postmodern way but now this alley is basically an outdoor Museum that many writers have begun to see themselves and their art form as legitimate participants within the Public Square can be seen in changes in their vocabulary and when asked what kind of place in society they would like to see writing culture occupi in the 1970s and 1980s writers would describe their painting Expeditions as bombing hitting or killing in the 1990s with the transition to Legal walls writers now got together to paint do you find that the street art culture graffiti culture has changed a lot from when you used to do it and then postco so it's become more accepted I think like a lot more people want to have art on their business or their garage sort of become a bit of a trendy thing in thanks to like parts of government that have really gone out of their way to like popularize it I'm frightful for the future of street are I feel like there's a lot of white kids from Richmond Hill bomb on like murals of ogs been putting in work for like several decades U bombing is like so basically you're going around it doesn't necessarily is indicative of like wrecking someone's mural but basically you're just going around and lighting up walls with paint so your stuff is never safe and that's why a lot of artists try to get interior murals cuz it protects it more but I think that begins to take away from the fact that it's street art it's now become an installation because it's inside I've done a lot of interior murals I like them more um personally for working but that's not really what it's rooted in and that's outside painting on walls so like it loses its authenticity it sanitizes graffiti into a neat exhibition where everything is clumped together the art pieces lose any community in spatial context and becomes individual pieces for spectating there's a reason why so many Street artists strongly oppose putting their work into museums street art cannot be separated from their environment or else they are no longer street art it's sort of in the name you're not just painting the wall like it also changed the vibe and changed The Narrative of the street so it can change a lot of things like usually like if I do small paintings people have to come to my show and come inside of the gallery and see the artwork but street art is just there the other thing that I uh noticed through doing the work and through talking to the street artist was that there was a whole audience for art that would never set foot in a gallery that thought galleries were boring they would tell me with no irony I love art dude I love art and then if I talk to them about any kind of historical art or anything like that it's like oh no no no it's this I do think that by bringing street art into museums it is neutered a little bit and I do think the Aesthetics of it changed that it becomes a kind of a fetish that gives a little bit more credibility and Street Credibility to um these institutions that are increasingly alienated from their younger audience we're all struggling out here if you pop all of a sudden and you're able to put your work in a gallery by all means you should do that but I feel like if it becomes more and more popular like it was when graffiti first became popularized in like the early '90s when guys were just doing like burners on a canvas and selling them for like $50,000 like that I think turns it into something that it's not really rooted in which is rebellion and expression that's more like commercialization of something like we're all trying to get money we're trying to survive so like big up if you actually do that if you get your stuff you get installations i' be in some galleries my canvas work coffee shops that's rad but like you want to stay rooted outside you'll also find lots of graffiti in Kensington Market

### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00]

historically a community known for its immigrant enclaves it's now a pretty popular shop and eat destination for tourists because of its quirky grungy aesthetic there are lots of vintage shops and restaurants here sprayed with graffiti art which feels quite ironic graffiti once undesirable and unprofitable now attracts people to buy $8 jeans and take Instagram photos street art used to disrupt the capitalist colonization of space and now it can be used to support it gentrification and financialization is a huge concern for residents of Kensington Market which has led to the formation of organizations like the Kensington Market Community Land Trust so is a community-based nonprofit organization our big picture mandate is to acquire and own property for the benefit of the community so what that means is owning it taking it outside of the uh of the speculative real estate market so that the benefits of owning that property stay in the community forever with the long-term goal of residential space and commercial space affordable in the community and preserving the kind of mixed use multiethnic diverse uh characteristics that make Kensington a really unique Community okay and why has Kensington been such a target of gentrification why is that happening I mean in the way that capitalism's always needs to be expanding its markets well it's a funky neighborhood which in a previous generation was kind of like a down andout place for people like me artists and people who don't quite fit in sort of find places on the edge to do what we do um but that then becomes attractive and then more and more people want to be around that it becomes a tourist destination it comes a place where people want to set up a funky bar or a restaurant and so a place that used to sell fresh food or was a butcher then becomes a bar or a cannabis shop or a place that was you know lowcost affordable place to live uh becomes what we call a ghost Hotel it becomes run under Airbnb so the in some ways um the things that made Kensington unique and attractive are therefore the things that then become places where capitalism's expanding markets move in and you know what traditionally calls is called gentrification starts to happen What I Call I think what we should be calling um the further financialization of Real Estate do you think there are ways in which street artists can prevent their subculture from being co-opted by like mainstream uh commodification of street art well I mean my first answer to be to that would be to work with organizations like ours we're doing a lot of work on that building that first building that we bought at 54 Kensington Avenue the Mona Lisa building first of all the Mona Lisa miral itself is pretty old and deteriorating and we may for environmental reasons want to put a cladding on the exterior of the building which would cover up the existing mural so we've got in touch with the artists who originally did that who now lives on the east coast and are have managed to put some funding together and are planning to bring him back to the neighborhood and I'm really excited about that that's an example of of street art or public art in this neighborhood that I think you know reflects the neighborhood reflects who are we are and is enables us to work with an artist that actually find money to pay that artist and to do it in conjunction with a really solidly community-based effort where again the benefits of that work are staying in the community I'm really excited by the model and I want to expand that model to not only be about owning property for cheap rent but also to keep the neighborhood you know that funky inclusive diverse arts-based kind of community that Kensington has been for generations and generations organizations like the kmt are finding ways to pay art without commodifying their art or their Community as a local nonprofit organization they are directly preserving the community's character through street art beautification projects enhance the community's character but that may not always be the case for example it is far less clear whether the beautification projects on the wall in the West Bank are appropriate or not the Palestinian side is filled with a disorderly array of street art and graffiti in an attempt to minimize the Behemoth walls Stark Gray appearance looming on this landscape sections of the side visible to Israelis are adorned with colorful pastoral scenes of Meadows trees and blue sky parts of the Wall in Jerusalem are painted in soft pastels depicting a Viaduct boarded by lush green fields and a vibrant Blue Sky these aesthetic devices are conscious attempts to disguise walled separation and the harsh reality of a scarred terrain I have heard Palestinians particularly older people insist that artists stop trying to be beautify the wall some Palestinians think graffiti minimizes

### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00]

the seriousness of the wall the Palestinian artist Aid arafa says I won't touch the wall with colors it's an act of normalization or beautification people come here now as though they are visiting the pyramids in Egypt like they are visiting a tourist attraction it's much different I think that the children now are of a different class and they've lost touch with hip-hop culture so like I apply the tenants of Honor respect skill hard work to what I do it's important to show them a way of conducting yourself and respecting other art and being like knowing that you're part of a community of other artists A lot of them come from privileged families they haven't struggled and their whole thing is to destroy and create problems because they've never experienced problems or hardship I mean There are rules but I mean the rules do apparently get suspended and I've had you know young guys come right up to me and go like I'm going to tag your mural in the weekend and they did I know that you know people are you know the audience is looking at it you know with their own frame of reference to and I know that the property owners certainly see what I do as being totally different from you know someone who would put a throw up on their wall overnight these murals are made in consultation with a client so they do have a lot of input into it maybe that makes a difference although I have to say that with this mural the first draft it was a digital drawing that I presented to them was accepted they had very little input into it actually there's an artist um I think she's from Denver Lauren y big into lgbtq Community she wants to have their voice heard through her art so some of her work is like very political okay but she kind of make it look very artistic and poetic and kind of hit High those messages in her like designs like very intricate designs so I think that's a very clever way to do it ultimately street art is certainly changing a lot and the Divide is widening between urban street artists who draw murals versus graffiti artist the authentic provocative messages that street artists used to make are often co-opted by a commodified aesthetic of leftist politics it's now often hard to tell just from looking when an aesthetic is authentic and when it's plainly a visual aesthetic used to serve capitalist goals in spatial Arrangements when I was in Berlin the marketing of its alternative aesthetic put squats and house projects in a bind Alexander vasudan who conducted an in-depth study of the history and ethnography of the Berlin squatting scene comments whilst the continued existence of alternative housing projects represented an opportunity to experiment with radical forms of shared living and working it also reminded squatters that their survival stemmed in no small part from the cultural capital they conferred on an increasingly neoliberal City and I was one of those tourists who cashed in on their cultural capital squats and house projects are easily co-opted because they have such a unique an artistic look they are for instance the focal points for many alternative walking and cycling tours run by guides explicit anti- capitalist signage and messaging seems like it should be less easy to co-op but since everyone in Berlin is used to seeing anti- capitalist anti-authoritarian content exists side by side with trendy boutiques high-end restaurants and expensive housing its potential for conveying genuinely transgressive or resistant messaging is dampened Street artists are now also caught in a damned if you do damned if you don't situation it's difficult for artists who are trying to disrupt and claim commodified marketized spaces to not accidentally become complicit in this commercialization and commodification so what are street artist supposed to do so embarrassing Jesus Christ like we've literally talked a million times many thinkers see graffiti and street art as additions to space which overlay it and decorate or disfigure it but in quill Ras paper street art Place making and anti- capitalist spatial activism she argues that the role of street art

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is not additive but transformative street art can be a substantial intervention into place identity it can be a restructuring force that changes how a space is legible or interpretable to its users as well as how that space forms a territory with insiders and Outsiders let's break that down there are three distinct ways in which street art can resist capitalist colonization of space I'm not finished okay first it can have explicit messaging or political content this content can give meaning to a space and can hint out what sorts of practices and people belong or don't belong for instance because graffiti culture rejects top- down control of space artists tend to express anti- capitalist anti-authoritarian anti-establishment content it's likely that you'll see a cab written around the city or free Palestine however because street art is so strongly tied to private property interests now there's a lot of a political street art because voice and countercultural stances are seen as bad for business as a result unclaimed spaces and abandoned properties have become the Central site of street art with explicit political content I often see the most political street art on Bridges or under bridges I also always find graffiti sprayed on City notice boards where they are constructing yet another condo or four lease signs where a local business is being replaced by a franchise these are ways for community members to express disapproval of changes being made to their space Second Street Art resists capitalist colonization of space by changing how we move through spaces and what we pay attention to in Quil kukla's fancy terms it's thereby shaping the phenomenological form and temporality of space when companies are doing their developing they tend to focus on certain areas creating hubs for businesses and then ignore other areas making them spaces to just pass through Street artists can challenge this capitalist neglect of space because they often Mark spaces that people don't pay attention to such as underpasses ceilings Alleyways and garage doors phenomenology fan for example when I visited a farmers market under an underpass this summer I was expecting the plain concrete you usually see under a bridge instead I was met with amazing mural but if this underpass was taken out of this Lively farmers market and put into a museum it would lose the essence of street art I would not be surprised out of my passivity I would not see the murals come to life from all the families sitting around and music playing in the air in a museum the murals would reinforce our passive role as viewers rather than be art that we actively shape our lives around street art can shift how we direct our attention as we move through a space which can in turn radically alter its perceived form it can also change our movement through a space as we move close to and Linger by a small piece for instance we may be caught off guard by an interesting drawing on a wall that we were just intending to brush pass and end up slowing down to take a closer look so street art draws upon us to pay attention to spaces that capitalism has deemed not useful or not profitable and gives them new meaning business developers and city planners design spaces in line with neoliberal interests but street art Alters that spatial and temporal form through a bottomup process thus street art can be used to disrupt a city's attempt to control its look and to curate a certain aesthetic for tourists lastly street art can be a tool of spatial secession which means it can be used to visually signal that a space has intentionally separated itself from the rest of the landscape okay street art helps turn spaces into specific territories in which some people belong and others do not for example squats and house projects in Berlin that are explicitly anti- capitalist often use fences walls and gates to enclose themselves the residents of these spaces often do not want to draw attention to themselves because they do not want their alternative grunge look to become part of Berlin's tourist attraction and hence to be commodified these fences walls and Gates as well as spray painted words are not just physical barriers but also phenomenologically bar Outsiders these visual signs intentionally signal that Outsiders are not welcome thus even though someone could technically open the gate or climb over the fence the graffiti still creat a spatial experience that only certain people can have street art is a collective public good and I want to defend the value of a huge variety of street art ranging from huge colorful murals to the random writing and doodles on walls especially in Toronto where houses are getting less and less affordable it gets harder and harder to find a studio to create art in but street art doesn't require a studio it is out there on public space but it's is getting harder and harder to find street art that is truly a public good

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the street art is still publicly accessible in spaces for free you can't not see a huge mural unless you're visually impaired in some way however the public no longer has shared ownership over this space instead it is private property owners who decide who can use this wall and who cannot they use bureaucratic application processes to decide whether your piece of art is good or whether it is vandalism that should be covered up I do want to acknowledge though that for small local businesses graffiti can be a pain and be considered property damage especially when graffiti is used to Target immigrants hi Kim it was nice to meet you today so I was just wondering like what your business is and how long you've been here for I'm in this area 30 years as a here Sal and where did the mural on your building came from that's uh last year it's so messy every day they write something drawing something so that's why I cannot stand for that this guy suggest okay if he Draw Something the painting and then they won't do that so that's why I did so he approached you he came up to you we are neighbor we know each other I want to say that I love Kim very much he's a really awesome woman I've known her a long time he said um they their rules among graphity guys and then he draw something and then leave a sign his a sign and then they don't touch what didn't you like about the graffiti that people were leaving before they don't have any rules and then there is a no Gap every corner he wrote something every day different guy that's a soy now the government actually pays people money to draw street art over the city um and so do you support the spread of street art in Toronto or are you against it as a business owner I will support because of if not then it's so messy and dirty everywhere in this area too so if AR is to do that and then it will be beautiful the commodification and Commercial ization of street art has put artists in a tricky spot but at the same time culture is made up of and sustained by its participants without artists there is no art and for all the criticism Street artists get for being sellouts when they work for commissioned murals it's probably nice that they can make a decent living off of their art and have the financial means to continue it probably better than having to run from the police now of course what would a YouTube video sa be without mentioning how evil your darn phones are as with many things in our life street art becomes one more instagrammable object however this can give a certain robot-like effect to graffiti art driving artists to subconsciously paint only for the photo painting becomes for the purpose of posting it and artists forget about the actual lived experience but while social media may have some downsides for the experience of creating art perhaps the trade-off is not so bad while the lack of anonymity now erases the scandalous Mystique of graffiti that doesn't seem essential to the core of the art form Street artists were forced to be anonymous to avoid legal persecution now that graffiti laws aren't as strict anymore they can share their work also there is never going to be an artist who is completely free from external constraint the artist today may have to rush to meet a commissioner's deadline but in the past they also had to rush to finish their art before the police discovered them to end this overly critical video off on a positive note Street artists are still finding ways to reclaim space and challenge commodification let me just tell one other story that I learned recently um there's a neighborhood School Kensington community school and they got some funding a few years ago to do art on some of the private garages down the lanway that goes next to the school and I just heard this story recently that apparently shortly after that was launched somebody came along and tagged a bunch of the murals but the artist who done the original work just took a bunch of photos and presented it as and called it a collaboration so kind of reclaimed the tagging work so I think that when those kind of things happen in conjunction with really solidly Community Based efforts that are

### Segment 11 (50:00 - 53:00) [50:00]

connected to people in the neighborhood and not to extractive capitalist forces then I'm excited about that and I think that's the kind of the role that art can play in the community when I talk about preserving the character of the neighborhood it's that it's diverse and there's people from all over the world and they're small and they're independent and they're finding a footo hold here um uh so what does art contribute to that well again to the extent that art is small and not owned by corporations but done by people with their own voice trying to create a vision and be part of a beautiful but small scale diverse neighborhood I think that could be a really exciting partnership how you doing good how's it going the original motivation of my son's mom is basically from her she's an artist she does all you know clothing and murals and all different stuff and she wanted to do the garage herself and she's NE chanell from the west coast and so my son is First Nations as well and so the original vision of it was some kind of indigenous imagery that would have reflected talis's culture right on his mom side and it didn't work for circumstantial reasons you know and so we came around again with Nick in a new inspiration and landed on dungeon and Dragons which also represents part of our culture you know the D and D theme is awesome I mean we're D andd nerds and this is talis's game and I want to mention that my younger brother is a very serious DND D player and he was excited that I was going to paint this mural I want to throw that in there Dan good man that's awesome Our intention is to actually give Nick a model of like an indigenous representation of probably a killer whale that's probably mention the best one to work with and so it will have that Echo you know of the cultural connections I'm excited and is a white dude to be able to do anything with permission that's indigenous It's A rad thing three artists are still fighting to have an authentic voice let's support their fight and change how we see their work next time you're walking through an urban city I encourage you to look around pay attention to the extra space around you what do you notice you might be surprised out of your passivity clearly something has changed # art is Life okay sorry this way or that way I'll do it see you again bye yeah see you guys again y yay I can't see what you guys were doing I hope it was good all right