I think this might be the same person who did this last time, it’s very close to where I saw the last one. Which the city dealt with in a matter of days from when I saw it, so maybe this particular canvas of street art will also get cleaned/painted over.
(I’m not against street art - I’m rather fond of some of the prettier examples of it as an art form, and tagging is an interesting form of self expression - I just said that in that I’m curious how long it will take the city to do something about this tag, since the previous one I found on City property also caused it and nearby graffiti to be quickly cleaned when previously ignored, and graffiti on a trash receptacle is the ultimate “not worth cleaning”.)
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In the sense that some are sanctioned by the state whereas some are not, absolutely. State-sanctioned murals are a response to unsanctioned street art. It allows the state to curate its message while engendering the appearance of progressivism and continuing to erase the art and speech of people who operate outside the state’s jurisdiction and message.
Tagging is the first step in the process of becoming a street artist when working outside the law, similar to how dealing weed can be the stepping stone to growing it. I don’t make this comparison between street art and illegal weed lightly either. In the same way that weed legalization is a form of primitive accumulation, state-sanctioned street art aims to disenfranchise those who built the culture. It does this to create wealth among those who did not build the culture by denying those culturally foundational people the ability to participate in the act legally.
Artists with no connection or background in street art are commissioned by the state to produce art for the state in a manner similar to patronage. The state gets to control the work of the artist while the artist can contribute to sustaining themselves off the pay provided by the state. Except, just like with legal weed production, the vast majority of the contracts and licenses that are handed out by the state are unreachable or denied to members of the community that created the market to begin with. Many times people caught doing street art have additional charges tacked on that increase the severity of the sentence, and the adoption of legal street art (again, much like legal weed) did not come with it, pardons, or any other meaningful commuting of sentences.
This is a form of enclosure and gentrification. Its whole aim is to “improve” the aesthetic of a given area by appropriating the street art style and history while pushing out actual street artists. This naturally benefits petite bourgeois elements of the area’s population by, again, appealing to liberal progressives, who view murals and street art as the same thing when they are fundamentally not. They view it as the state “accepting” street art and legitimizing it. Not as what it really is, an enclosure of the formally “public” spaces once claimed and owned by the organically forming illegal street art scene within a city or town.