The writings on the wall
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Weiser-Banet, S. (DRAFT) The writings on the wall: Street art, convergence and the authentic.
- Unfinished, don't cite
Contents |
Responses to Sony's stencil PSP campaign
Upset parties
- Anti-graf activists, "urban blight"
- The ads are "not art"
- Self-identified "street artists"
- Sony's street art practice is inauthentic because it lacks risk
- Implied "anti-authoritarianism" and "anti-consumerism" among graf writers generally
Choice of stencil important?
- Wooster and Banksy revived interest in graf
- Among people who think tagging is lame or uncreative, not artful
Did Sony hire "real" street artists?
- Were people feeling rebuked?
- Who designed the stencils?
- Seems like component of a multi-layered failure to work within a complex social situation
Analyzing these tensions
- "Maintaining a difference between [convergent spaces occupied by corporations and street artists] as oppositional is crucial to neoliberal capitalism"
- "Decentering consuming products as the crucial act of consumption ... rather highlighting cultural practices as consumptive spaces"
Convergence: selling out is the new real
"Within neoliberal culture, how, and where, do we locate the "non-commercial"?"
- This problem wrt CC-BY-NC license
"Marketization" of social life
- Epistemelogical conflict
- Recognizing this as a change requires specific historical/cultural knowledge system
- e.g., "blurring boundaries between creativity, politics, and commerce"
- When, where were such boundaries?
Two uses of "convergence
- Converging of two cultural realms: authentic and commercial
- Historical trajectory of these realms
Historical changes in brand strategy
- Toward creating "structures of feeling" (Williams)
- Within which individuals construct (and are constructed?) according to certain parameters of difference, distinction?
- Diversity, identity are commoditized
"Authenticity itself is a brand"
- Is it a brand?
- Or a characteristic of a brand strategy ?
- Or a desirable feature sought by brand consumer/participants?
Distinction
- Distinction is essential
- Suggests that a non-commercial space exists
- Brands rely on this (ontological) space in order to root claims on the authentic
Creativity in capitalism
- Equal to entrepreneurship?
- Not oppositional
- Re: (Rose, Nikolas. 1990)
Street art + advertising
Is tagging anything but building a personal brand?
- How is "hustle and grind" opposed to advertising?
- IME, "street artists" are the first to get jobs in industry
- re: Moonman scandal in Boston
Wooster works with art galleries
- Ecommerce
- Commercial spaces
- Producing books, magazines
- A website
- "Wooster" Brand
Street artists in competition with
- "Assimilating" advertisers
- Police
- Gangs
- "Social invisibility"
"Longing for authenticity"
- Are virtual and contrived polar opposites of authenticity?
- Can something be authentically virtual? Virtually contrived? Virtually authentic?
Creative class
- Currid, "a graffiti artist who works for an advertising agency"
- Florida links "creativity" and economic/tourism $
- Thus even the seemingly counter-cultural "street art" is raising the "creativity" quotient of the streets
- One reason that the anti-art tag is not celebrated within Wooster?
Graf is advertising, Kataris
- Yes, graf is advertising
- No, it is not of the disenfranchized
- This is the dream of graffiti (as an experience economy dream-commodity)
- But empirically, are the graf writers disenfranchized? Or are they art students writing in gentrified neighborhoods?
