Pics or it didn’t happen: The artwork formerly known as heritage in Google Street Art

Abstract

In 2014, Google announced a new initiative for its Cultural Institute. Called the Street Art Project, the online database was seen by many (Google included) as a continuation of the Google Art Project, in that it sought to make street art from around the world more easily accessible to interested audiences. The company acknowledged that such art was temporary, and that, by virtue of the artwork’s eventual disappearance, it would eventually become an important record of preservation for the practice. However, in its focus on the physical artwork, the project unwittingly highlights a problematic trend in street art’s protection as intangible heritage: one where its safeguard often becomes overpowered by the tangibility of its material elements. Exploring Google Street Art through the lens of Melbourne, a city that has long negotiated with street art and graffiti as forms of cultural heritage, this article outlines the consequences of such tangibility for the intangible artwork. It argues that any protection of intangible heritage requires a tacit acknowledgement of the subjectivity which surrounds its experience: those community reactions and responses whose wide variability help define that heritage as something intangible.