Featuring NYC online flame war over street art -The profitable nature of the Wooster Collective
Posted December 24th, 2006 by surplus
In the last week or so a flame war has been raging on the nyc indymedia site over the issue of street art. The discussion has raised many interesting points including: What is street art? Who defines what street art is? Does street art contribute to or challenge capitalism? Is there a difference between anti-corporate and anti-capitalist street art? What does or would (if it exists) an anti-capitalist street art look like? Is vandalizing a building or someone’s street art inherently sexist?
Check it out at: http://nyc.indymedia.org/or/2006/12/80898.html
While at first I was skeptical about those who were taking a position against street art (and argued that their “irony, negativity and deconstruction was non other than the ideology of the (capitalist) machine itself) as the discussion developed, a fairly clear articulation of an arguement emerged. I believe that (if not just for the sake of knowing our enemy) the position they articulate is an important one to understand if we are going to find ways of confronting capitalism. Or at the very least one we need to understand if we are going to deal with the reasons why the anti-street artists don’t like street art. I’ve tried below to put together the fragments of the postion.
Our position in reading them is to either write them off as a simply another nihilist critique (as I originally did) or think of them as pointing to emergence of a new form of anti-capitalist street art. Is this a constructive expansion of what is currently known as street art?
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specialists
…directed at “street artists.”…your compromises with capital are not some side deal you make to support your art; it is essential to it, capital is woven into your production. This makes you specialists, role players in the commodities market capable of producing only more commodities, and vulgar ones at that shot through with specialized techniques and acres of pretense. Do most people engage in the same form of production? Yes, which you seem to acknowledge. What you fail to acknowledge is that this makes you just like every other peon and your work is a commodity just like a Starbucks Frappaccino or a billboard. Being a specialist in the production of a particular type of commodity is percisely what allows you to make art incapable of destroying capital; you can only feed it. Giving it a thin coating of politics doesn’t alter its fundamental character. Your art does not attack capital or any system of oppression for that matter, it is a part of it. It is part of a bourgeois sponsored rebellion that invades the streets, and three cheers to whoever is destoying it so we don’t have to keep watching slack-jawed yuppies gazing at it and then photographing it for their retarded blogs and saying how “dope” it is. You’re part of the gentrification of this city, not an opposition to it. And any gallery artist who thinks they’re doing anything radical by putting their art up in the streets should get their head checked. Like I said, it’s a branding campaign.
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Coopting culture
The central issue in this article is not that artists are selling out and losing credibility for taking money for their work, but that the Wooster Collective is a hypocritical parasite preying on the work of these artists. I fully agree that a necessary part of creating a genuine culture of resitance is understanding how to relate to the mainstream, but groups like Wooster only weaken these cultures by trivializing their basic principles and using their image as a money-making tool for themselves. Marc Schiller is the culprit here, not Swoon (though the artists aren’t all innocent either).
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I have nothing to confess
What can exceed a street artist’s ego? Not a cogent critique of the artist’s method or how it plays into post-sixties utopic vision on the power of expression.
The current manifestation of street art has gone one step further. From the dissidence of a refusal to stick to the agreed upon territory of a canvas, moving to the coveted space of a gallery’s walls and into the depths of collector’s pockets — within street art is the bare instructruction for moving in a culture of cooption.
And the impotence of a population to ask of its creators for a little less than creativity.
Street art is foul.
But only as foul as a corrupted culture will pay for it to be. With its hero worship, with its secret packs to individualization, down to every want-to-be landowner’s desire for genocide.
Long live the creative!
confused
… you defend yourself by saying you’re guilty of none of the things (you are accused) of, i.e. being a careerist interested in profit and glamor and galleries. but you start off by defending people like shepard fairy and swoon and others that clearly are about those things. then you praise wooster and the show at 11 spring, both chock full of profit-minded careerists. you can’t have it both ways. are you scared of offending your patrons? how do you explain the contradiction?
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RESIST THE PRESENT THAT YOU THINK YOU OWN
So what if we are alienating the street art community. They are slaves to fucking capitalism and are totally complicit. Worse still they have proclaimed themselves the new authority on resistance. Who is to say that vandalizing street art isn’t part of the street art dialogue? Throwing paint on your street art is street art. That’s our solution. If they are alienated it’s not our fault. It’s their problem. They have invented a form of property that they defend in the same way that the original property owners do. Vandals are destroying our property Oh no!!! This new class of street artists are no more open to individual forms of representation than are the business people who represent themselves by painting everything one color. Graffiti and street art (whatever you want to call it) should be in resistance to something. You guys are defending your turf.
They “descended on the area to defend what they saw as THEIR art” tell me this isn’t about ownership? When you yell “whose streets, our streets” do you actually think that you and your little subclass are the rightful owners of the street? Over everyone else?
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critics and corporate viral marketers - two sides to the same..
….There are those of us who go on and on and on about the virtues of street art as a “dialogue” – to that I must thank our critic for stopping and forcing us to ask the question - How long will this “dialogue” continue and at whose expense? All this dialogue will be fucking useless when it’s underwater in 100 years (or less). You realize that it’s not just the corporations that are responsible? That if all we are is a false resistance movement then we are also to blame? If street art is useful at all it is not as a dialogue but as a battlefield that is constantly shifting and fought over. What I see when I look to the street is a war between those who are doing everything they can to make a buck off of new “radical” expressions (ie. by implementing unique “community based” marketing campaigns) and those who are working to transform that false “radicality” into expressions that mobilize people to refuse and attack the system. There are many street artists out there who recognize the role they play in this. They don’t like that works, inspired in an effort to fight are being integrated as part of the celebration of the destruction of a building in an overpriced, overdeveloped neighborhood. We’re talking here about people who understand visual language and realize that people are moved when they see signs that they identify with. If street art or anti-capitalism in general is to mean anything it has to be grounded in a refusal to hand over the signs that represent and attack on the market. This doesn’t mean that we should stop producing and “selling” street art. It means that we need to fight for the message that our street art is “selling” to people.
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RESIST THE PRESENT THAT YOU THINK YOU OWN
So what if we are alienating the street art community. They are slaves to fucking capitalism and are totally complicit. Worse still they have proclaimed themselves the new authority on resistance. Who is to say that vandalizing street art isn’t part of the street art dialogue? Throwing paint on your street art is street art. That’s our solution. If they are alienated it’s not our fault. It’s their problem. They have invented a form of property that they defend in the same way that the original property owners do. Vandals are destroying our property Oh no!!! This new class of street artists are no more open to individual forms of representation than are the business people who represent themselves by painting everything one color. Graffiti and street art (whatever you want to call it) should be in resistance to something. You guys are defending your turf.
They “descended on the area to defend what they saw as THEIR art” tell me this isn’t about ownership? When you yell “whose streets, our streets” do you actually think that you and your little subclass are the rightful owners of the street? Over everyone else?——–
still street art, no matter how pretentious
maybe i’m missing something here, but wouldn’t posting situ-inspired broadsides up over street art still count as exactly the same kind of emminently co-optable, if not already totally late capitalist, street art the broadsides ostensibly critique? i’m mean, just because it’s relatively skill or talent free, and recycles some more or less alienating jargon from Debord and co, does not make it an intrinsically revolutionary act, and doesn’t mean it doesn’t play into exactly the same game it pretends to be so removed from in its revolutionary purity….
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you got any fire in you?
As an “emminently co-optable” form street art, like the all the other fake revolutionary forms, temporarily represents the solution to whatever previous form it supposedly challenges while it “plays into exactly the same game it pretends to be so removed from in its revolutionary purity”. There is a difference however between real street art and fake street art. Real street art only exists as a form of resistance toward something else. It’s not formless. It is embedded in the host of whatever is pretends to represent it. It doesn’t have to invent its own symbols because it’s the real thing. It doesn’t prop up it any particular aesthetic or its own inclusive circle of friends as the “solution” over any other. Where false forms like street art emerge as the latest contemporary form of resistance, the real thing is always hidden just beneath the façade. The attacks on street art are not attempts to reclaim something that any group owns over any other. They are an effort to push those who are positioning themselves as the next solution off their fucking throne.
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the complaint
Basically it looks like the “haters” complaint is that after a while street artists eventually get pulled into the mainstream.
I know anarchists don’t believe in political parties blah blah blah but look its just like the evolution of a revolutionary political party.
It starts off small, underground, possibly illegal, very few people notice.
It gets bigger, gains more resources and attention, people respect it.
Keeps getting stronger and bigger but never dominates politically.
Eventually it gets brought into the fold of parliamentary/electoral politics.
Continues to say revolutionary things but is co-opted by the system.
Still a progressive force but is now playing by the rules inside the system.
New small, underground, possibly illegal group with a few people springs up to challenge the system.
Rinse, repeat.
A street artist in galleries, museums, doing tours, publishing books, etc. is like a marxist-leninist party in parliament. Sure it’s progressive and may contribute to society but it basically traded in it’s chance to really change anything.
This happens to everyone, artists, musicians, politicians, kids who’ve been out of college for a while…is it selling out? Just getting more mature? Maybe these guys should retire? I mean not totally but retire whatever you were doing on the street, you know? It might be painful but once you cross over like that you’ve passed your prime, at least in that genre, style, medium, whatever…
Still it does seem like the famous last words of every sellout is “Aww, man, don’t be a hater!”
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Call it what you want
The difference between the anti-capitalist street artist and the anti-corporate street artist is that the anti-corporate street artist trades in apples and oranges. They work like politicians, rebranding the commodity and repackaging the same old system in a new outfit. The package always claims EQUALITY but inside is always packed with contradictions. The latest flavor of the month is stencils I guess. Or is it wood block prints? This is because the anti-corporate street artists can’t bare to look at themselves critically. They see the devil in corporations when business people make USD’s while they spend their time screen printing their own paper money (or trying to).The anti-capitalist street artists, when they manage to avoid the apples and oranges trade [red, white and blue flags out, red and black flags in] which is rare, they attack everything equally – leaving no brand sacred. It doesn’t have anything to do with how hard someone worked on something, or if they were a waitress once – if the anti-capitalists best friend starts getting their “whose shit is bigger cock-off” they’ll get CUT DOWN. Being REAL means being able to give THAT to your friends and thank them for giving IT to you when you deserve it. Equality should mean that you don’t have to suck up to someone’s ass to build solidarity with them. …
This isn’t an attack, it’s a message wheat pasted to your wall. Read between the lines. The devil you wanted to believe only dealt in USD’s has returned to haunt you in your own work. Open up your wall to criticism and maybe we’ll have a chance to CUT this system DOWN to size.Or maybe we should just decorate?
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